a, and in
India. The power of changing color which it possesses is not really its
most remarkable characteristic. Far more worthy of notice are its slow
pace, extraordinary form, awkward movements, vivacity, and control of
eye, and marvellous rapidity of tongue. It is the most grotesque of
reptiles. With protruding and telescopic eyes, that move at will in
the most opposite directions, with an ungainly head, a cold, dry,
strange-looking skin, and a prehensile tail, the creature slowly steals
along a branch or twig, scarcely distinguishable from the substance
along which it moves, and scarcely seeming to move at all, until it has
come within reach of its prey. Then suddenly, with a motion rapid as
that of the most agile bird, the long cylindrical and readily extensile
tongue is darted forth with unerring aim, and the prey is seized
and swallowed in a single moment of time. The ordinary color of the
chameleon is a pale olive-green. This sometimes fades to a sort of
ashen-gray, while sometimes it warms to a yellowish-brown, on which
are seen faint spots of red. Modern naturalists, for the most part,
attribute the changes to the action of the lungs, which is itself
affected chiefly by the emotions of anger, desire, and fear. [PLATE
XXVIII., Fig. 5.]

The great extent of the Empire caused its vegetable productions to
include almost all the forms known to the ancient world. On the one
hand, the more northern and more elevated regions bore pines, firs,
larches, oaks, birch, beech, ash, ilex, and junipers, together with the
shrubs and flowers of the cooler temperate regions; on the other
hand, the southern tracts grew palms of various kinds, mangoes,
tamarind-trees, lemons, oranges, jujubes, mimosas, and sensitive plants.
Between these extremes of tropical and cold-temperate products, the
Empire embraced an almost infinite variety of trees, shrubs, and
flowers. The walnut and the Oriental plane grew to avast size in many
places. Poplars, willows, fig-mulberries, konars, cedars, cypresses,
acacias, were common. Bananas, egg-plants, locust-trees, banyans,
terebinths, the gum-styrax, the gum-tragacanth, the assafoetida plant,
the arbor vitse, the castor-oil plant, the Judas-tree, and other
somewhat rare forms, sprang up side by side with the pomegranate,
the oleander, the pistachio-nut, the myrtle, the bay, the laurel, the
mulberry, the rhododendron, and the arbutus. The Empire grew all the
known sorts of grain, and almost all th