not only for tasting, eating and drinking, but also for cleaning their eyes. 
Its stickiness is an asset in taking beetles and other insects from narrow 
crevices. The mouth contains a great number of teeth, quite similar in 
shape, each having one cusp on a cylindrical base. The gecko’s neck is 
short and thick-set. The medium-sized tail is exceedingly fragile. If it 
breaks off, it will grow again, but without the diagonal rows of scales 
which adorned the original. 
Many of the geckos shed their fine outer skin periodically and usually 
eat it. 
The geckos vary widely in their habits and appearance, depending 
upon their environment. Some live in trees growing on jagged cliffs, and 
pursue their prey at night, often while running upside down. Others, living 
in sandy regions, have slender toes trimmed with scales, adapted to the 
sandy terrain of Turkestan, Persia, Arabia and the African deserts. 
Most of the desert geckos are under seven inches in length. Some 
geckos in the Malayan region attain lengths of fifteen inches and are quite 
stocky. They eat other lizards as well as their staple diet of insects, and 
are not averse to gobbling up a small bird or rodent. 
Geckos are often attracted to tropical homes by insects hovering about 
the light of a lamp. They can enter houses through the smallest crevices. 
They scurry over the walls and ceilings so swiftly that it is almost im¬ 
possible to catch them. One writer tells of a gecko in Colombo, Ceylon, who 
was trained to appear at a colonist’s dinner table each day at dessert time. 
The family once left the house for some months, yet when they returned 
and sat down to dinner, the gecko reappeared. 
Geckos have received their name from a cry which they utter “by a 
convulsive movement of their tongue.” The usual cry resembles “yecko” 
or “gecko” although some emit a sound like a cat’s “meow.” 
They have, almost throughout the world, achieved a sensational repu¬ 
tation for being poisonous, but in actual fact they are quite harmless, unable 
even to bite severely. It is not odd, therefore, that a species inhabiting the 
American southwest should mistakenly be known as the “poison lizard.” 
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