The Chameleon. 
311 
“ Tk’ eye of Heav’n beholdetli nouglit more strange 
Then the chameleon, who with various change 
Receives the colour that each object gives, 
And food-less else of th’ aire alonely lives.” 
Drayton has a similar passage, and Skakspeare refers 
several times to this creature’s atmospheric diet. Hamlet 
replies,to inquiries as to his health, “ Excellent well, i’ 
faith; of the cameleon’s dish: I eat the air, promise 
crammed: you cannot feed capons so ” ( Hamlet , iii. 2, 98). 
The power of changing colour which this animal 
possessed was well known :■— 
“ I can add colours to the cameleon.” 
(3 Henry VI., iii. 2, 191.) 
“ A true cameleon, I can colour for it.” 
(Ben Jonson, The Staph of Neivs, iii. 1.) 
But the cause of the alteration was not clearly under¬ 
stood. The change of hue is explained by modem 
naturalists as due to the contraction and dilatation of 
elastic colour-bags in the animal’s skin. Sir Francis Bacon 
says that— 
“ the chameleon feedeth not only upon air, though that be his principal 
substance, for sometimes he taketh flies as was said, yet some that have 
kept chameleons whole years together, could never perceive that they 
fed upon anything else but air.” 
He gives a fairly accurate description of the creature 
itself. George Sandys, in his Relations of Africa, 1610, 
does not confirm the stories of this extreme abstemious¬ 
ness, though he alludes to them. This traveller describes 
the chameleon as-— 
“ a creature about the bignesse of an ordinary lizard; his head unpro- 
portionably bigge, his eyes great and moving without the writhing of 
his necke, which is inflexible; his backe crooked, his skinne spotted 
with little tumors, his tayle slender and long, on each foot he hath five 
fingers, three on the outside, and two on the inside, slow of pace, but 
swiftly expanding his tongue of a manner marvellous for the proportion 
