SALAMANDERS. 479 
singly on leaves of Myriophyllum, which adhere to the glu- 
tinous egg, concealing it.* (Cope.) Those of Desmognathus 
are laid connected by a thread both on land and in water. 
The common land salamander, or Plethodon erythronotum 
Baird, lays its eggs in summer in packets under damp 
stones, leaves, etc. ; the young are born with gills, as is the 
case with the viviparous Salamandra atra of the Alps. The 
possession of gills by land salamanders, which have no use 
for them, and which consequently drop off in a few days, 
leads us justly to infer that the land salamanders are the de- 
scendants of those which had aquatic larve. 
The lowest form of this order is the aquatic Congo-snake 
or Amphiuma means Linn., in which the body is large, very 
long, round and slender, with small rudimentary two-toed 
limbs ; there are no gills, though spiracles survive. It lives 
in swamps and sluggish streams of the Southern States. 
A step higher in the Urodelous scale is the Menopoma, which 
is still aquatic, with large spiracles, but the body and feet. 
are as in the true salamanders. The Menopoma Alleghani- 
ense Harlan, called the hellbender or big water lizard, is 
about half a metre (14-2 feet) in length, and inhabits the 
Mississippi Valley. Allied to the Amphiuma is the gigantic 
Japanese salamander, Cryptobranchus Japonicus Van der 
Hoeven, which is a metre in length. Allied in size to this 
form was the great fossil salamander of the German Tertiary 
formation, Andrias Scheuchzerit, the homo diluvit testis of 
Scheuchzer, thought by this author to be a fossil man. 
In the truesalamanders the body is still tailed, the eyes are 
rather large ; there are no spiracles ; they breathe exclusively 
by their lungs, except what respiration is carried on by the 
skin. 
The genus Amblystoma comprises our largest salamanders ; 
they are terrestrial when adult, living in damp places and 
feeding on insects. The larve retain their gills to a period 
when they are as large or even larger than the parent. The 
most interesting of all the salamanders is the Ambdlystoma 
mavortium, whose larva is called the axolotl, and was origi- 
nally described as a perennibranchiate amphibian under the 
name of Siredon lichenoides Baird. This larva is larger than 
* Gage’s Life-history of the Vermillion-spotted Newt. Am. Nat. 1891. 
