Notices of New Books. 3857 



flew wildly about the cage, biting at anything presented to him. At 

 night T observed him vividly green, as at first; a token, as I presumed, 

 that he had in some measure recovered his equanimity. The next day 

 he continued very fierce. I hung the cage out in the sun ; two or 

 three times in the course of the day I observed him green, but for the 

 most part he was black. The changes were rather quickly accom- 

 plished. 



" After he had been in my possession about four days, I observed 

 him one morning sloughing his skin; the delicate epidermis, loosened 

 from the body and legs, looked like a garment of thin white muslin, 

 split irregularly down the legs and toes, and separated from that of 

 the tail, on which the integument yet adhered unbroken. Through- 

 out the day the loosened skin hung about the animal, though more 

 and more loosely. He had not abated a whit of his fierceness ; leap- 

 ing at a stick pointed at him, and seizing it forcibly with his teeth. 



" Another individual, caught in the same locality, and by the same 

 device, I introduced into the cage of the former, who did not offer any 

 molestation to the intruder. After they had remained in my posses- 

 sion, the one about six weeks, the other about four, they both died, 

 almost on the same day, and both in the process of sloughing. In this 

 operation the skin appears to be first separated from the head ; for in 

 one of these it was perfectly loose from the whole head, and was re- 

 movable in one piece, but to the neck and entire body it still adhered 

 by organic union. T suspect that the sloughing of the skin is, at least 

 sometimes, the result of universal excitement. All that I had taken 

 alive, and caged (amounting to many individuals), after the most 

 violent behaviour at first, soon sloughed ; usually the very next day. 

 The food of this lizard appears to include both vegetable and animal 

 substances. I was never able to induce one to eat in captivity ; but 

 the dissection of several has given me this result. Thus in one T 

 found hard seeds and farinaceous substance; in another the fragments 

 of a brilliant Curculionideous beetle, and other insects. I once ob- 

 served a large one on the summit of the mountain, deliberately eating 

 the ripe glass-eye berries, munching half of one away at a mouthful. 

 It would require no great warmth of imagination to identify these 

 sunny, spicy, pomiferous groves with the golden- fruited gardens of 

 the Hesperides, and this fierce, sinister, saw-crested lizard, with the 

 watchful dragon that guarded them. If I had the naming of him, I 

 would call him Ladon." — p. 148. 



(To be continued). 



XI, 



