"Tails" of a Lizard.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 16 October 1914, Page 2

"Tails" of a Lizard.

With the higher animals, as we have seen, Nature trusts to adaptability, but lower in the scale she is much more obliging, actually providing her damaged children with new limbs. Not artificial 'ones, understand,, but with nice new ones, just as good as those lost.

The marvel of the shell-fish which grows ' fresh- covering periodically, has been described before, but it may not be as well known that many reptiles are both brittle and possess the quality of re-growing whatever part of them is lost. The commonest example, of cotirse, is that supplied by the lizards, and it is an awful shock to the young naturalist he. makes the discovery for himself.

Slow worms, or blind worms, as they are often called, are not as numerous as they once were ; but they may occasionally be found, and the cr.y of "snake" is immediately raised. To all appearances the reptile in question is a small serpent, but, of course, "You" know that he is nothing ©f the sort. True, he looks as much a snake as anything, but really he is a lizard who 'has lost his legs, and he lacks the requisite features of the snake, or perhaps I should say that he has qualities unshared by them. For exainjue, the blind worm has eyelids which, of course, no snake possessor. My the way, it is most unfair to call him a blind worm just because his eyes are small ; it is as silly as talking of a blind mole, but then so- many of these popular names are absurd. Our slow worm, then, is not a worm ; he is not very slow : but anyway he is a lizard, and he shares the lizard's ability to snap his tail off if he is roughly handled. Now it is bad enough when a lizard's thin, spiky tail breaks off short in one's fingers, but it is often more disconcerting when a nice little snale comes in two. The blind worm himself would deny that he did anything of the sort, his idea being that he has merely discarded a portion of his tail, but then, since that member reaches up to his collar stud, it is fearfully difficult for the begin nor to say what has happened. The difficulty is to know where a snake's neck ends and where his tail begins. It must not be imagined that the lizard, having effected his escape by leaving his tail in his would-be-captor's hands, is doomed on that account to be tail-less for the rest of his career. As a matter of fact, he begins making up his deficiency at once. Lizards hate to be conspicuous, besides this particular lizard has learned the value of having, so to speak, a spare tail, and so a new tail is grown, and if at first it looks oddly stumpy it goes on growing until it has reached its 'former degree of elegance. But just sometimes a dreadful catastrophe happens with at least one well-known member of the lizard family. He is so anxious to recover his lost appendage that he starts two or three of them at the same time, so that he has a whole bunch of tails—something like a cat-o'-nine-tails ! He finds them horribly embarrassing, but there they are, and he has to make the best of them. What his friends say, and whether he manages! to ma*ke them believe that his is the latest fashion, and that .shortly all lizards in good society will wear a number of tails, Ido not know. What I do know is that the youthful naturalist must be careful how he attempts to classify lizards by their tails, since it is possible to have four of the same family, one with a long and graceful tail, one with no tail at all, one with a short and stumpy one, and one with three little tail-buds.—" Weekly Telegraph."