lowing highly
interesting and germane statement:--"1st, My late lamented friend,
William Christy, jun., found a fine specimen of the common scaly lizard
with two young ones. Taking an interest in everything relating to
Natural History, he put them into a small pocket vasculum to bring home;
but when he next opened the vasculum the young ones had disappeared, and
the belly of the parent was greatly distended; he concluded she had
devoured her own offspring; at night the vasculum was laid on a table,
and the lizard was therefore at rest: in the morning the young ones had
reappeared, and the mother was as lean as at first. 2d, Mr Henry
Doubleday, of Epping, supplies the following information:--A person
whose name is English, a good observer, and one, as it were, brought up
in Natural History, under Mr Doubleday's tuition, once happened to set
his foot on a lizard in the forest, and while the lizard was thus held
down by his foot, he distinctly saw three young ones run out of her
mouth. Struck by such a phenomenon, he killed and opened the old one,
and found two other young ones in her stomach, which had been injured
when he trod upon her. In both these instances the narrators are of that
class who do know what to observe, and how to observe it; and the facts,
whatever explanation they may admit, are not to be dismissed as the
result of imagination or mistaken observation."[149]

It is remarkable that all the serpents to which the phenomenon is
attributed are ovo-viviparous. Our common lizard, to which the facts
just narrated doubtless belong (_Zootoca vivipara_), has the same
property, which, however, appears to be by no means common among the
Saurian races. This coincidence, while it would afford a handle to the
deniers of the stated facts, in the assumption that the emergence of the
living young from the abdomen, or their presence within it, has given
rise to the notion--may have an essential significance and connexion
with the phenomenon itself, on the hypothesis of its truth. That
endowment, whatever it be, which enables the young to live and breathe
in the abdominal cavity of the mother before birth, may render it easier
for them than for others not so endowed to survive a temporary
incarceration within the stomach after birth. Mr Newman does not know
how to believe that a young and tender animal can remain in the strongly
digestive stomach of a viper and receive no injury; but he has forgotten
to take into the accoun