Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/832

812 disappointed after they have missed it; pursuing one another; inflating their dewlaps and depressing their crests when enraged, they fly away spasmodically to drop a few yards farther along, down upon another tree, along which they continue their evolutions. In some dragons the tympanum is visible, in others it is hidden by a fold of the skin. A special genus (Dranunculus) has been constituted for the latter, while the former compose the genus Draco. This genus is represented by six species, of which three inhabit the island of Java; one, recognizable by its vertical nostrils, is peculiar to continental India; the fifth is native to the island of Timor; and the sixth is found at Pulu Penang. The Dranunculus inhabits Amboyna in the Moluccas, Celebes, and the Philippine Islands.

The dragons are the only existing reptiles that possess organs of aerial locomotion. Other saurians have folds of skin along the flanks; but in no other of them is this disposition so developed as in a curious geckotian, the Ptychozoon homacephalum of Java and other Sunda Islands. A broad membrane extending from the temples to the tail, where it is divided into slit lobes, is broadened along the flanks. Without reaching the dimensions of the patagium of the dragons, or possessing its rigid supports, it represents a kind of parachute, the importance of which may have been augmented by long use; or else we may regard these extensions of the skin as survivals of a provision which sedentary or profoundly changed habits have rendered useless.

It may be added that the livery of the Ptychozoon is of such a nature as to assure it all the advantages of protective resemblance. The green color, yellowish on the upper side of the body, greenish along the flanks, varied with brown lines or transverse brown fasciae, constitutes a general tone which becomes, with wonderful ease, confounded with the bark and parasitic plants with which the trees are covered where they pass their lives.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature.

[To this account of these interesting animals we add a portrait of the frilled lizard (Chlamydosaurus Kingii), which possesses an appendage of different structure from the wings of the dragons, but at the first view reminding one of them. The frill, which is its conspicuous ornament, is covered with scales and is toothed on the edge. It does not come of full size till the animal is grown, and increases—according to Wood—in regular proportion to the age of the owner. In the young it does not even reach the base of the fore-limbs, while in the adult it extends well beyond them. M. F. Mocquard, who observed one of the animals during several weeks, is of the opinion that it serves the lizard as a kind of parachute, sustaining it during its