THE YENUS LIZARD. 
145 
both died, almost on the same day, and both in the 
process of sloughing. In this operation the skin ap- 
pears to be first separated from the head ; for in one 
of these, it was perfectly loose from the whole head, 
and was removable in one piece, but to the neck and 
entire body it still adhered by organic union. I 
suspect that the sloughing of the skin is, at least 
sometimes, the result of universal excitement. All 
that I have taken alive, and caged (amounting to 
many individuals), after 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 I 
found hard seeds and farinaceous substance ; in 
another the fragments of a brilliant Curculionidous 
beetle, and other insects. I once observed 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 had 
the naming of him, I would have called him Ladon. 
THE GRAVE-DIGGER. 
On the earthen floor of the building, formerly used 
as the boiling-house on Bluefields estate, but now 
H 
