GVHE LIZARD. 151 
short legs, each with five digits, and travel upon the rocks and 
over the bushes and trees with considerable dexterity and agility, 
being essentially aided by a wiggling motion of their bodies and 
long tails. They always excited in us such a decidedly repugnant 
feeling, that we did not consider ourselves at all slighted when 
we observed on their part an evident desire to avoid us as disa- 
grecable intruders; and yet these reptiles are decidedly good 
looking and attractive when contrasted with another genus of the 
same family in Australia, whose ferocious appearance, armed as 
they are with horns on their heads and spines on their bodies, 
have secured for them the descriptive and suggestive name of 
** Horrid Molochs.” 
One of our passengers from Nassau to Fernandina in the 
Western Texas, was Mr. Albert H. Phelps, of West Pawlet, Vt.— 
a self-educated naturalist, only seventeen or eighteen years of age, 
having a most ardent love for natural history, who, while at 
Nassau, so taxed and exposed himself in the intensely hot sun, 
collecting and preserving as many specimens as possible of the 
singular forms of life in and out of the water, that he was at- 
tacked with a dangerous ail malignaut fever, and nearly lost 
his life. In regard to the New Providence lizards, he in sub- 
stance said: ‘‘I have ten or more species; some of them, includ- 
ing their fong slender tails, are ten inches long. One, of a dark 
brown color, is very showy. It has five golden spots, and its 
back is so raised as to form a ridge. It has also a dew lap. 
After I knocked it down with a cane, the bright colors and the 
dew lap disappeared, and the reptile was all of a pale ash color. 
I killed another before he had time to change color. It was of 
an umber brown, with clusters of lemon yellow spots, very minute, 
so that a little distance off each cluster seemed a little spot. 
The dew lap was a Tich shade of dark umber brown, with a rich 
stripe of yellow “round the small bone under its jaw, and ’round 
