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Show 858 MR. NELSON ANNANDALE ON THE [Dec. 4, and of deep purple. The female is very like the male, except that she is smaller, that her colouring is not so brilliant, and that the blue markings are almost entirely absent from her under surface. W h e n the Lizard is running about the sand its brilliant shades are not conspicuous, for the lower surface is hidden beneath the body, and the bars on the sides are almost concealed in the folds of loose skin which are present in the living specimen. Liolepis is exceedingly timid and very agile ; as a rule one does not see it until it commences to run away, at the distance of several yards. It lives in burrows, which it excavates, so tbe Malays say, by means of its feet and its snout. W h e n one of the males is taken in the hand, it attempts to bite, for it has sharp teeth and a strong jaw, and struggles violently. As it struggles, it flattens out its body, by enlarging the lower angle formed by the ribs with tbe vertebral column, so that the purple and orange stripes on its sides come into view. The female tries the same tactics, but without such great effect, for in her case neither are the stripes so brilliant nor the ribs so mobile. It is very possible that the male makes some display * before the female at the time of courtship. The Malays say that the " Biawak Pasir" is monogamous, and on many different occasions, at Biserat and elsewhere, children brought m e two specimens together, male and female, which they said they had snared in a single hole. The case of the Lizard is not quite parallel to that of the Grasshopper, for it is evident that in 1 That reptiles do indulge in nuptial dances is proved by the case of the " Snmpah-sumpah" (Calotes versicolor), a Lizard whose great powers of changing its colour have caused the colonists of the Straits to misname it the Chameleon. W h e n the male is courting the female, he is of a pale yellow colour early in the day, though in the afternoon he appears to become slightly darker ; and he has a very conspicuous black patch a on either side of the throat which calls attention, as it were, to the gular pouches, that he is constantly inflating. He posts himself on some conveniently conspicuous perch, such as the top of a fence or a banana leaf, with his tail stretched out behind him and his fore-quarters raised as high as possible upon the legs. The bend is held very erect, but is constantly being nodded up and down, very much in the same way as that of a cock pigeon is nodded under similar circumstances. He opens and shuts his mouth continually, as if he were chattering, but no sound is emitted ; it is probably this habit which has given the Lizard its Malay name, which seems to be connected with a word (sumpah) that means to curse. In this manner the male advances gradually towards the female, only progressing a few steps at a time. The female remains concealed during the performance, which often commences at a considerable distance from her retreat. I found on several occasions that if one male was killed while dancing, his place was taken by another before many hours had passed. If he was captured, the black spots disappeared from his throat immediately ; but they reappeared after death. The males of this Lizard are extremely pugnacious, and when they are fighting together they change colour repeatedly, the victor usually assuming a reddish tinge. The females differ from the males in most species of this genus in that the gular pouches and the nuchal and dorsal crest are smaller than in the other sex ; also they do not seem to have the power of colour-change so well developed. a See also Capt. Stanley Flower's paper on " The Reptiles of the Malay Peninsula and Siam," in the ' Proceedings' of this Society, 1899, p. 641. My observations were made iu Bangkok, Singora, and Patalung, in the months of March and April. |