Reptile

“ The reptile advanced with writhing and undulatory movements, from time to time rearing its head to the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and slowly turning it about, as though on the lookout for prey. ”

“ The wonder which science weaves into the meaning of the word "reptile," "bird," or "mammal," is partly in exhibiting minor changes of character in those organs and other soft parts, but far more in showing that while they endure unchanged, the hard parts of the skeleton are modified in many ways. For the bones of the reptile orders stretch their affinities in one direction towards the skeletons of salamanders and fishes; and extend them also at the same time in other directions, towards birds and mammals. ”

“ It is said, by naturalists, of this monstrous reptile, that he delights, when the returning warmth of spring has brought his fellows from their holes, and placed them basking along the banks of a swampy lagoon, to dart into the centre of the expanse, and challenge the whole field to combat. ”

“ Common language gives the name of reptile, from a Latin word meaning to creep or crawl, to the snake and the toad, the lizard and the frog, and all similar hairless animals having either no legs at all or very short ones and crawling on the stomach. Science, however, makes a difference; it limits the name reptile to the snake, the lizard, and other animals having a scaly skin and hatching from the egg in the form they are to keep ”

“ The elimination of Reptile characters from so much of the skeleton, and the substitution for them of the characters of Birds and Mammals, would be of exceptional interest if there had been any ground for regarding the flying animal as more nearly related to a Reptile than to a Bird. ”

“ Had she been on land and armed with her staff, it would not have dared even to show itself; for, like all savage creatures, the reptile has a marvellous instinct, which warns it against the bearer of the vril wand. ”

“ That is to say, the complete evidence of the evolution of the bird from the reptile should be of this character, that in some ancient formation reptiles alone should be found, in some later formation birds should first be met with, and in the intermediate formations we should discover in regular succession forms which I pointed out to you, which are intermediate between the reptile and the birds. ”

“ Such relative variety of structure is seen in all imaginings that spring up independently in different regions of the globe, and are yet due to a common belief or cause. Why has he assimilated so much of the reptilian physiognomy and framework? Well, seeing that he had to approximate his shape to some type of beast familiar to mankind, what better general model could have been found? The reptile’s glassy eye; its earthward-creeping and cleft-loving habits; its blood that recalls that chill temperature of stones and water ”

“ In nearly all animals the fore-legs are smaller and more symmetrical than the hind-legs. In the reptile family the fore-leg looks very like an arm and hand.
To return to the case of the bird and the reptile, we find that the first bird-like flying creatures, were not birds but reptiles of a bat-like construction; while the first biped creatures, supposed from their footprints to be birds, were not birds but biped reptiles. An enormous space of time separated biped reptiles from real birds. ”

“ The strangest thing about the land reptiles is the fact that certain of them walked on their hind legs, like birds, and made three-toed tracks in the mud. Indeed, these fossil tracks, found in slate, were called bird tracks, until the bones of the reptile skeleton with the bird-like foot were discovered. ”

“ But it is in the structure of the pelvis and of the hind limb that some of these ancient reptiles present the most remarkable approximation to birds, and clearly indicate the way by which the most specialized and characteristic features of the bird may have been evolved from the corresponding parts in the reptile. ”

“ The reptile now evolved from the amphibian, and a vast reptile population spread over the earth. From one of these early reptiles the birds were evolved. Geology furnishes the missing link between the bird and the reptile in the Archæopteryx, a bird with teeth, claws on its wings, and a reptilian tail. From another primitive reptile the important group of the mammals was evolved. ”

“ In the same way, when we see how like the ancient birds and reptiles were to each other, so that it is very difficult to say which were bird-like reptiles and which were reptile-like birds, we can only conclude that they, too, once branched off from some older race which had that bone between the jaws, that single neck-joint, and the other characters which birds and reptiles have in common. ”

“ The neck is so formed with rib-like processes that it can be moved but little, so the giant reptile has no means of ridding itself of its persistent insignificant torments, the flies, and is at the mercy of the Nile bird’s appetite to get relief. ”

“ True, there are naturalists who maintain that the teethed bird is still a bird, and the archeoptrix a reptile, a variety and not a transitional form. Still, such cases indicate a tendency on the part of the reptile to rise to the bird, and of the bird to retain properties of the reptile; and natural selection and development alone can explain this. ”

“ Not a track remains of a single foot, or a single hoof; of all the countless millions of men and beasts whose progress spread desolation over the earth. But the Reptiles, that crawled upon the half-finished surface of our infant planet, have left memorials of their passage, enduring and indelible. No history has recorded their creation or destruction; their very bones are found no more among the fossil relics of a former world. ”

“ Science uses the word "reptile" in a more exact way, to define the assemblage of cold-blooded animals which in familiar description are separately named serpents, lizards, turtles, hatteria, and crocodiles. ”

“ The nature of a reptile is now sufficiently intelligible for something to be said concerning flight, and structures by means of which some animals lift themselves in the air. It is not without interest to remember that, from the earliest periods in human records, representations have been made of animals which were furnished with wings, yet walked upon four feet, and in their typical aspect have the head shaped like that of a bird. ”

“ The possession of scales is one of the most striking points of resemblance between birds and reptiles. At first sight it seems to be almost absurd to attempt to draw any parallel between the active, feathered, hot-blooded bird and the scaly, cold-blooded reptile ”

“ They present from age to age diversity of aspect and habit, and in unexpected differences of outward proportion of the body show how the laws of life have preserved each animal type. For the vital organs which constitute each animal a reptile, and the distinctive bony structures with which they are associated, remain unaffected, or but little modified, by the animal's external change in appearance. ”

“ Among others, the fish in which the eye of a geologist has been able to discover the first form of the reptile. It was quite evident to me that we were ascending the scale of animal life of which man forms the summit. My excellent uncle, the Professor, appeared not to take notice of these warnings. ”

“ The reptile, on the other hand, has cut out all the tadpole stages from its life cycle, or, to be more exact, its tadpole stages are got through before the young leave the egg case. The reptile has come out of the water altogether. ”

“ In those old ages before man arrived, there were new things in the world. Since man came, there is nothing new under the sun: the facts which we learn and call new, are all old, very old.
The reptiles were of the improving classes of animals. To be in full harmony with their habitations, and not miss any of the possibilities of their kingdom, we find the reptiles accommodating themselves to the earth, the air, and the sea. There was, for instance, the hadrosaurus, a two-legged reptile, which had long, strong hind legs, and a strong, pointed tail. ”

“ So far as yet known, the reign of reptiles was world-wide in its time; and the imagination is taxed to conceive of a state of things in which the seas swarmed with great reptiles on every coast, when the land was trodden by colossal reptilian bipeds and quadrupeds, in comparison with some of which our elephants are pygmies, and when the air was filled with the grotesque and formidable Pterodactyls. ”

“ Passing over eighteen centuries, we find the knowledge of reptiles to have remained as stationary as other branches of natural history, perhaps even more so. The reptile fauna of Europe was not extensive enough to attract the energy of a Belon or Rondelet; popular prejudice and the difficulty of preserving these animals deterred from their study; nor was man sufficiently educated not to give implicit credence to the fabulous tales of reptiles in the 15th and 16th centuries. ”

“ But the characteristic life, in water and on land, was the vast and diversified family of the reptiles. In the western and the eastern continent, and along the narrowing bridge that still united them, in the northern hemisphere and the southern, and along every ridge of land that connected them, these sluggish but formidable monsters filled the stage. Every conceivable device in the way of arms and armour, brute strength and means of escape, seemed to be adopted in their development, as if they were the final and indestructible outcome of the life-principle. ”

“ Lurking in the dense reeds, or tangled herbage that grows rank and teeming at the edges of rivers in hot climates, or under the mangroves that interweave their myriad roots in arches above the water, or concealed among the bleaching trunks and branches of trees that have fallen into the stream, these huge reptiles watch for the approach of a living prey, or feed at leisure on the putrid carcases with which the waters daily supply them. ”

“ The reptiles have in fact completed the conquest of the land which was undertaken by the previous group, and many of them, living as they do in dry and hot deserts, are as independent of the water as any form of animal life. Thus whereas the amphibian has a thin skin, which is kept moist by the secretions of numerous skin glands, the reptile has a body-covering of scales, which form an effective protection against a too rapid loss of moisture. ”

“ Few persons can have paid any attention to these reptiles without having been struck with a phenomenon which, when observed for the first time, seems singular in the extreme,—the facility with which the tail breaks off on the slightest violence. ”

“ So I have again written out my lectures, with the aid of the latest discoveries, and the story of animal structure has lost nothing in interest as a twice-told tale. It still presents in epitome the story of life on the Earth. He who understands whence the Flying Reptiles came, how they endured, and disappeared from the Earth, has solved some of the greatest mysteries of life. ”

“ With very few exceptions the reptile abandons its egg to hatch alone. The young reptile has no knowledge whatever of its parent; its mental life, such as it is, begins and ends with its own experiences. ”

“ In the transition from the fish to the bird there is an anomalous animal, long since extinct, named by the geologists the pterodactyl, or the winged reptile, a lizard with feathers upon its paws and plumes upon its tail. ”

“ And on the other hand, from the point of view of the teaching of Darwin in the theories of modern science, we are led to ask whether a flying reptile may not be evidence of the physical exaltation which raises animals in the scale of organisation. ”

“ With the dawn of the tertiary period, the reign of the reptiles begins to wane, and the reign of the mammals to set in at last in real earnest. In place of the ichthyosaurs we get the huge cetaceans; in place of the deinosaurs we get the mammoth and the mastodon; in place of the dominant reptile groups we get the first precursors of man himself. ”

“ Once we remember to have heard the subject of the possibility of lizards snakes, frogs, and other cheerful reptiles having resided for indefinite periods in the stomachs of human subjects, discussed in the presence of the microscopic man. A lady of the party was skeptical on the subject, dwelling especially upon the impossibility of any person swallowing a reptile unawares. ”

“ All the sorts of reptile we know now were much more abundantly represented then, great turtles and tortoises, big crocodiles and many lizards and snakes, but in addition there was a number of series of wonderful creatures that have now vanished altogether from the earth. ”

“ And its familiar voice wearies not ever.
Like the wide heaven, the all-sustaining air,
It makes the reptile equal to the God:
They who inspire it most are fortunate,
As I am now; ”

“ It is an example of an extremely specialised reptile, the loss of the limbs being the most obvious way in which it is specialised from more generalised reptilian types. Specialisation in fact is often synonymous with degradation, and, this being the case, implies a restricted life. ”

“ Of all the wonderful animals revealed by their petrified remains, perhaps the most striking are the reptiles. The reptiles made their first appearance in the Permian or in the latter portion of the Carboniferous preceding, but here at the very inception of their line they developed a great diversity of form and habit. There were aquatic and terrestrial forms, carnivorous, herbivorous and omnivorous forms, forms simple and closely resembling their amphibian ancestors and forms so bizarre in their structure that the world has produced nothing more strange. ”

“ They were beings of an age dead for hundreds of millions of years, I learnt, creatures of the Mesozoic age, that period of the earth's history which we call the age of reptiles. For in that age the races of mammals had hardly begun to arise, and the great and smaller reptiles and lizard-races were the rulers of all earth. And just as man, the creature of dominant intelligence, was to develop later from the races of mammals, so had these lizard-men, the dominant intelligence of their own age, developed from the races of reptiles. ”