Nor is this the only case in which fathers and mothers take care of their young. In one species of frogs living near Paris, the father[63] winds the long string of gluey eggs round his thighs, and buries himself in the ground till the young tadpoles are ready to come out, and then he leaps into the water. And in one of the tongueless toads, the Surinam toad,[64] the mother’s soft skin swells up, forming ridges and hollows, and when her eggs are laid the father clasps them in his feet, and, leaping on her back, puts an egg into each hollow. Then the mother goes into the water, and remains there while each tadpole completes its changes in its own hole, jumping out at last a finished toad.

Yet, in spite of curious habits such as these, the frogs and their companions on the whole lead

Footnote 63. Alytes obstetricus.

Footnote 64. Pipa Americana.

a very monotonous life. They are, it is true, more intelligent than fish, and have learned to know more of the world, but in the long ages that have passed since their ancestors roamed in the coal-forest marshes, other and higher animals have taken possession of the land, and left room only for a few scattered groups of amphibia. Still, however, they remain hovering between two lives, and filling such spots as neither the fishes nor the land animals can occupy; and when we hear them croaking in the quiet night, or see them leaping on the marshy ground, they remind us that we have still living in our day, a link between the fish whose world is a world of waters, and the air-breathing animals which have become masters of the land.

--- THE REPTILES IN THEIR PALMY DAYS.

CHAPTER V. THE COLD-BLOODED AIR-BREATHERS OF THE GLOBE IN TIMES BOTH PAST AND PRESENT.

And now the transformation is complete, for when we pass on to the next division of backboned animals, the “Reptiles,” we hear nothing more of gills, nor air taken from the water, nor fins, nor fishes’ tails. From this time onward all the animals

we shall study live with their heads in the air, even if their bodies may be in the water; they swim with their legs or, as in the case of the snakes, with their wriggling bodies, and they lay their eggs on the land where their young begin life at once as air-breathers.

Yet they can often remain for a long time both under water and under ground, for they are still cold-blooded animals, breathing very slowly, and easily falling into a state of torpor when the air around them is cold and chill. They are but the first step, as it were, to active land-animals; yet they have played a great part in the world, and when we know their history we shall be surprised to find how much Life has been able to make of her cold-blooded children.

To learn how this has been, however, we must travel away from home and our own surroundings. The tiny brown lizard which runs over our heaths, while its legless relation, the slowworm, burrows in the ground,—the few snakes which glide through the grass of our meadows, and the stray turtles thrown at rare intervals on our shores,—tell us very little about true reptile life. It is to Africa, India, South America, and other warm countries, that we must go to find the formidable crocodiles, huge tortoises, large monitor-lizards, and dangerous boa-constrictors, cobras, and rattle-snakes. And even then, strong and powerful as some of these creatures are, they do not tell us half the history of the cold-blooded air-breathers. For the day of reptile greatness, like that of the sharks and enamel-scaled fish, was long long ago.

Now that we know how frogs pass from water-breathing to air-breathing, and how axolotls, accustomed to live all their life in the water, can lose their gills and become land-animals, we can form an idea how in those ancient days, while still the huge-plated newts were wandering in the marshes, some creatures which had lost their gills would take to the land, and their young ones starting at once as air-breathers, as the black salamanders do now (see p. 80), would in time lose all traces of the double or amphibian life, and become true air-breathing reptiles.

At any rate, there we find them appearing soon after the coal-forest period passed away, at first few and far between, in company with the large amphibians, but spreading more and more as the ages passed on, till they in their turn became monarchs of the globe. Already, when the coal-forests had but just passed away, a lizard,[65] in some points like the monitors that now wander on the banks of the Nile, was living among his humbler neighbours; and from that time onwards we find more and more reptiles, till just before the time when our white chalk was being formed by the tiny slime-animals at the bottom of the sea, we should have seen strange sights if we could have been upon the globe. For the great eft was no longer

“... lord and master of earth.”

All over the world, and even in our own little England, which was then part of a great continent, cold-blooded reptiles of all sizes, from lizards a few inches long to monsters measuring fifty or sixty feet from head to tail, swarmed upon the land, in the

Footnote 65. Protorosaurus or Thuringian lizard.

water, and in the air. There were among them a few kinds something like our tortoises, lizards, and crocodiles; but the greater number were forms which have quite died out since birds and beasts have spread over the earth, and a wonderful and powerful set they were.

Some were vegetable-feeders, which browsed upon the trees or fed upon the water-weeds, as our elephants and giraffes, our hippopotamuses and sea-cows do now. Others were ferocious animal-eaters, and their large pointed teeth made havoc among their reptile companions, as lions and tigers do among beasts. Some swam in the water devouring the fish, while others, like birds or bats, soared in the air.

In the open ocean were the sea-lizards, some called Fish-Lizards,[66] like huge porpoises thirty feet long, but really cold-blooded reptiles, with paddles for legs, and long flattened tails for swimming. Woe to the heavily-enamel-scaled fish when these monsters came along, their pointed teeth hanging in their widely-gaping mouths as they raised their huge heads, with large open eyes, out of the water! Then among these were others with long swan-like necks and small heads,[67] which would strike at the fish below them in the water, while other slender, long-bodied monsters,[68] measuring more than seventy feet from tip to tail, flapped along the sea-shore with their four large paddles, or swam out to sea like veritable sea-serpents, devouring all that came in their way. These were all water-reptiles, while there were also many smaller land-lizards playing about

Footnote 66. Ichthyosaurus.

Footnote 67. Plesiosaurus.

Footnote 68. Mosasaurus and Clidastes.

upon the shore, and among the trees and bushes. But the strangest of all were perhaps the “Flying reptiles”[69] of all sizes, from one as small as a sparrow to one which measured twenty-five feet from tip to tip of its wings. These reptiles did not fly like birds, for they had no feathers, but only a broad membrane, stretching from the fifth finger of their front claw to their body, and with this they must have flown much as bats do now, while some of them were armed not only with claws, but also with hooked beaks and sharp teeth, with which they could tear their prey.

And meanwhile upon the land were wandering huge creatures, larger than any animal now living, which were true reptiles with teeth in their mouths, yet they walked on their hind legs like birds, probably only touching the ground with their short front feet from time to time, as kangaroos do. They had strong feet with claws, the marks of which they have left in the ground over which they wandered, supporting themselves by their powerful tails as they went.

Some of them were peaceful vegetarians,[70] browsing on the tree-ferns and palms, and rearing their huge bodies to tear the leaves from the tall pine-trees. But others were fierce animal-feeders. Fancy a monster thirty feet high,[71] with a head four or five feet long, and a mouth armed with sabre-like teeth, standing upon its hind legs and attacking other creatures smaller than itself, or preying upon those other huge reptiles which were feeding peacefully

Footnote 69. Pterodactyls.

Footnote 70. Iguanodon in Europe, Hadrosaurus in America.

Footnote 71. Megalosaurus in Europe, Dryptosaurus in America.

among the trees. Surely a battle between a lion and an elephant now would count as nothing compared to the reptile-fights which must have taken place on those vast American lands of the west, or on the European pasture-grounds, where now the remains of these monsters are found.

But where are they all gone? We know that they have lived, for we can put together the huge joints of their backbones, restore their gigantic limbs, and measure their formidable teeth, but they themselves have vanished like a dream. As time went on, other and more modern forms, the ancestors of our tortoises, lizards, crocodiles, and afterwards snakes, began to take the place of these gigantic types; while warm-blooded animals, birds and beasts, began to increase upon the earth. Whether it was that food became scarce for these enormous reptiles, or whether the birds and beasts drove them from their haunts, we are not yet able to find out. At any rate they disappeared, as the ancient enamelled fishes and large newts had disappeared before them, and soon after the beds of white chalk were formed, which now border the south of England and north of France, only the four divisions of tortoises, lizards, crocodiles, and snakes, survived as remnants of the great army of reptiles which once covered the earth.

* * * * *

Ah! if we could only have a whole book upon reptiles to show how strangely different these four remaining groups have become during the long ages that they have been using different means of defence; and how, even in a single group, they employ so many varied stratagems to survive in the battle of life! Look at the tortoises with their hard impregnable shells, the crocodiles with their sharp-pointed teeth and tough armour-plated skins, and the silently-gliding snakes with their poisonous fangs or powerful crushing coils. See how the tiny-scaled lizard darts out upon an insect and is gone in the twinkling of an eye, and then watch the solemn chamæleon trusting to his dusky colour for protection, and scarcely putting one foot before another in the space of a minute.

Each of these has his own special device for escaping the dangers of life and attacking other animals, and yet we shall find, before we finish this chapter, that they are all formed on one plan, and that it is in adapting themselves to their different positions in life that they have become so unlike each other.

We shall all allow that the Tortoises are the most singular of any, and it is curious that they are also in many ways the nearest to the frogs and newts, although they are true reptiles. Slow ponderous creatures, with hard bony heads (Fig. 20), wide-open expressionless eyes, horny beaks, and thick clumsy legs, the tortoises seem at first sight to be only half alive, as they lumber along,

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