NATURAL HISTOEY OP SELBORNE. 
t 
43 
impregnates the spawn of the female. How wonderful is the economy 
of Providence with regard to the limbs of so vile a reptile ! While it 
is an aquatic it has a fish-like tail, and no legs : as soon as the legs 
sprout, the tail drops off as useless, and the animal betakes itself to 
the land ! 
] Merret, I trust, is widely mistaken when he advances that the 
' Bana arborea is an English reptile ; it abounds in Germany and 
Switzerland. 
It is to be remembered that the Salamandra aquatica of Eay (the 
water-newt or eft) will frequently bite at the angler's bait, and is often 
caught on his hook. 
I used to take it for 
granted that the Sa- 
lamandra aquatica 
was hatched, lived, 
and died, in the 
water. But John 
j Ellis, Esq., F.R.S. 
i (the coralline Ellis) 
asserts, in a letter to 
the Royal Society, 
dated June the 5th, 
1766, in his account 
of the mud inguana, 
an amphibious bipes 
from South Carolina, 
that the water-eft, or 
newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I 
should be suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in his 
own words. Speaking of the opercula or coverings to the gills of the 
mud inguana, he proceeds to say that, " The form of these pennated 
coverings approach very near to what I have some time ago observed 
in the larva or aquatic state of our English lacerta, known by the name 
of eft, or newt ; which serve them for coverings to their gills, and for 
fins to swim with while in this state ; and which they lose, as well as 
the fins of their tails, when they change their state and become land 
animals, as I have observed, by keeping them alive for some time 
myself" 
Linnaeus, in his " Systema Naturae," hints at what Mr. Ellis advances 
more than once. 
Providence has been so indulgent to us as to allow of but one 
venemous reptile of the serpent kind in these kingdoms, and that is the 
viper. As you propose the good of mankind to be an object of your 
publications, you will not omit to mention common salad-oil as a 
sovereign remedy against the bite of the viper. As to the blind worm 
{Anguis fragilis, so called because it snaps in sunder with a small blow), 
I have found, on examination, that it is perfectly innocuous. A neigh- 
bouring yeoman (to whom I am indebted for some good hints) killed 
and opened a female viper about the 27th of May : he found her filled 
with a chain of eleven eggs, about the size of those of a blackbird ; but 
WATER-NEWTS. 
