AUGUST. 207 



and make no effort to escape. There is a bare possibility 

 that the efforts on their part to escape, and fear, when 

 finally captured, may produce a hypnotic condition, or 

 something like it, but this would pass by and leave them 

 wild. This, I think, never occurs. Once in my hand, I 

 have never known a pine-tree lizard to be otherwise than 

 perfectly tame. But, in a large series in confinement, I 

 found that the sense of hearing was constantly brought 

 into play, as shown by their ludicrous actions when flies, 

 shut in a thin paper box, were placed near them. They 

 not only heard but recognized the noise — a very impor- 

 tant matter, bearing as it does upon their intelligence. 

 Indeed, in the woods about May's Landing I found that 

 the lizards were perfectly familiar with many sudden 

 sounds and paid no attention whatever to them. Some of 

 these were the sonorous croak of the bull-frog, the quick 

 scream of the blue jay, the rattle of the golden-winged 

 woodpecker, and the coarse cry of the great-crested fly- 

 catcher. These were all unheeded, while my own cough- 

 ing, the whistling of a single note, or the loud utterance 

 of a word, caused them either to assume a make-ready 

 attitude or to dart away. On the other hand, have these 

 lizards any voice ? Their actions inter se are strongly 

 suggestive of the affirmative, but, so far as I am able to 

 determine, their utterances are confined to hissing, and 

 this I only heard when I provoked the creatures by the 

 sudden infliction of severe pain. Among a large number, 

 in nine weeks I never heard a voluntary hiss. This, how- 

 ever, is wholly negative evidence, and I am disposed to 

 believe that an animal possesses a voice, if its habits, in 

 their entirety, suggest that it has one. This perhaps un- 

 scientific method of reasoning arises, on my part, from 

 the fact of having long suspected that certain fishes and 

 salamanders had voices, before they were detected — my 

 suspicions being based upon the habits, as a whole, of 



