ORDER SAURIA. 16? 



certain of them may be seen to run with the quickness of 

 an arrow, launched by the hand of a vigorous archer ; others 

 walk with difficulty, and appear as it were to trail them- 

 selves along the ground. 



Whatever may be the nature of the movements which 

 these animals are adapted to exercise, it is in those climates 

 over which the sun exerts the most genial influence, that 

 their various modes of locomotion are most completely and 

 energetically developed. The greatest degree of atmospheric 

 heat seems necessary to bring out, as it were, all their mo- 

 tile forces. In such countries therefore, as Egypt, so nearly 

 approaching to the tropics, on the burning coast of Africa, 

 on the torrid banks of the Senegal, the Nile, and the Gam- 

 bia, in the intertropical solitudes of the New World, and 

 in the Archipelago of the Moluccas, and the Antilles, where 

 the sun maintains an everlasting reign, we find the saurian 

 races enjoying all the plenitude of their existence, and 

 distinguished for the power, suppleness, and agility of their 

 motions. 



We might also assert, that a humid atmosphere, an aquatic 

 soil, a certain superabundance of water, are indispensable to 

 the numerous production of these animals. Egypt, which we 

 have just cited, and where the saurians appear to rise as 

 it were from the earth in all parts, is not merely a hot 

 climate. An in:imense river in its periodical inundations 

 covers the whole face of the country with a humid slime. 

 The marshes and savannahs of South America, the mighty 

 tracts inundated by the Oronoco and the Amazons, the 

 island shores of the Equatorial Atlantic, are all subject to 

 similar conditions of temperature and humidity. They are 

 all bathed by tepid waters, and the innumerable legions of 

 lizards and other saurians which inhabit them, enjoy a 

 degree of activity far superior to that which distinguishes 



