56 
THE GEISSOSA URL 
impossible to give more than a very slight account of these reptiles, or even to mention more 
than a small number selected as types of the large or small groups which they represent. 
Indeed, the lower we descend in the scale of creation, the more numerous the species seem 
to become, and the more perplexing is the task of selecting those species which are worthy of 
mention on account of their scientific characteristics, and yet possess sufficient individuality to 
interest the general reader. 
To watch the greater number of reptiles in their wild state, is a task simply impossible for 
any human being to achieve. Many reptiles live in dry and thirsty lands, where no creatures 
but the white ant and the Lizard seem to acquire moisture, and through which the traveller 
can only pass with hasty steps, dreading the delay of each minute, lest his precious store of 
water should fail, and leave him to perish by the most terrible of deaths. 
Others reside on the sides of precipitous rocks, over which the enterprising traveller can 
only pass at hazard of life and limb, and in any case would not be able to watch the proceed- 
ings of the shy and timid Lizards that find their home among these craggy recesses, and retreat 
into them on the slightest alarm. But the chief residence of the reptile race is to be found in 
hot climates, and in low, swampy ground, where the morasses are ever filled with decaying 
vegetable matter, and exhale a soft, thick, miasma, as deadly to the white man as the fumes 
of arsenic, and injurious even to the dark-skinned native, who can breathe unharmed a fetid 
atmosphere that would smite down his white master as quickly and surely as if he were struck 
with a bullet, and who only attains his fullest development under these conditions. 
In these dread regions, their seething putridity concealed by all the luxuriant vegetation 
of tropical climes, like a royal mantle flung over a festering corpse, the reptile race abound, 
the poisoned air being to these creatures the very breath of life, and the surrounding decay the 
sustaining power of their existence. Indeed, the object of their lives seems to be, by individual 
transmutation of poisons into living flesh, to destroy by slow but certain degrees the mass of 
decaying vegetation, and so to prepare an abiding place for beings of a higher order than 
themselves. 
On placing ourselves even in imagination amid such scenes, we seem to be transported 
back into the former ages of our earth, when man could find no resting-place for his foot, and 
no atmosphere in which he could breathe and live ; when the greater part of the soil was little 
more than soft mud, the air thick, dank, heavy, and overcharged with decomposition, and the 
multitude of strange reptiles that bored their slimy way through the deep ooze, crawled lazily 
upon the slowly hardening banks, or urged their devious course through the turbid waters, 
were the physically ruling though morally subservient powers of the world. 
Little is wanting to complete the illusion, except to give to every object an increase of 
dimensions ; for the vegetation of those days was rank and luxuriant to a degree that is now 
well indicated, though on a smaller scale, by the foliage of the tropics, and the huge forms of 
the ancient and now extinct reptile race are closely reproduced by the more familiar inhabitants 
of the swamp before us. 
As the expanse of putrefaction was greater in those epochs, so the miasma destroyers were 
larger. Frogs and toads as big as calves, reptilian quadrupeds as large as elephants, and 
reptilian bats expanding leathery wings as wide as those of the pelican, were fit inhabitants of 
the atmosphere which they breathed, and in which their mission was consummated. How that 
the marshy districts are smaller and less poisonous, the reptile race that inhabits them is of 
smaller dimensions. 
The earth has now been so far purified by successive generations and regenerations of life 
and death, added to human ingenuity and industry, that its harmful districts occupy but a 
comparatively small portion of its surface, the greater part of the world being suitable for 
human habitations, the black man settling as a pioneer, a hewer of wood and drawer of water, 
where the white man cannot yet abide. But in all those localities where the miasmatic 
exhalations impall the land with their pestilential mantle, and scatter the seeds -of death 
on every breeze, the reptiles may be found luxuriating amid the deadly elements, and thriv- 
ing in spots where the foot of man dares not tread, and his inquiring eye ventures not to 
penetrate. 
