Page:A narrative of travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro.djvu/31

1848.] sunning themselves on logs of wood, or creeping up to the eaves of the lower houses. In every garden, road, and dry sandy situation they are scampering out of the way as we walk along. Now they crawl round the trunk of a tree, watching us as we pass, and keeping carefully out of sight, just as a squirrel will do under similar circumstances; now they walk up a smooth wall or paling as composedly and securely as if they had the plain earth beneath them. Some are of a dark coppery colour, some with backs of the most brilliant silky green and blue, and others marked with delicate shades and lines of yellow and brown. On this sandy soil, and beneath this bright sunshine, they seem to enjoy every moment of their existence, basking in the hot sun with the most indolent satisfaction, then scampering off as if every ray had lent vivacity and vigour to their chilly constitutions. Far different from the little lizards with us, which cannot raise their body from the ground, and drag their long tails like an encumbrance after them, these denizens of a happier clime carry their tails stuck out in the air, and gallop away on their four legs with as much freedom and muscular power as a warm-blooded quad-ruped. To catch such lively creatures was of course no easy matter, and all our attempts utterly failed; but we soon got the little Negro and Indian boys to shoot them for us with their bows and arrows, and thus obtained many specimens.

Next to the lizards, the ants cannot fail to be noticed. They startle you with the apparition of scraps of paper, dead leaves, and feathers, ended with locomotive powers; processions engaged in some abstruse engineering operations stretch across the public paths; the flowers you gather or the fruit you pluck is covered with them, and they spread over your hand in such swarms as to make you hastily drop your prize. At meals they make themselves quite at home upon the tablecloth, in your plate, and in the sugar-basin, though not in such numbers as to offer any serious obstruction to your meal. In these situations, and in many others, you will find them, and in each situation it will be a distinct kind. Many plants have ants peculiar to them. Their nests are seen forming huge black masses, several feet in diameter, on the branches of trees. In paths in woods and gardens we often see a gigantic black species wandering about singly or in pairs, measuring near an inch and a, half long; while some of the species that frequent