=Body form and organization.=--The body varies from a long and slender, truly snake-like form as in the tropical cœcilians through the usual salamander (fig. 119) shape, where it is more robust but still elongate and tailed, to the heavy, squat, tailless condition of the toads. Legs, with five digits, are usually present, and are used for swimming, walking, or leaping. The legs are longest and best developed in the short tailless frog and toad forms which are mostly terrestrial, and are short and weak in the tailed salamander forms, many of which are aquatic. The skin is almost always naked, showing a marked difference from the scaled condition of reptiles and most of the fishes, and its cells secrete a slimy, sticky, usually whitish fluid, which in some cases is irritating, or even poisonous. The skin is sometimes thrown up into folds or ridges, and in some species is elevated to form a kind of fin on the tail or back. This unpaired fin differs from the dorsal fin (and other fins) of fishes in not being supported by rayed processes of the skeleton. There are in some batrachians traces of an exoskeleton in the presence of scale-like structures in the skin or in the horny nails on the digits, but these cases are rare. The skin contains pigment-cells and many of the batrachians are brilliantly colored and patterned; some of the pigment is carried by special contractile or expansile cells, the chromatophores (see account of chromatophores of the Cephalopoda, p. 256), so that the animal can change its tint and markings more or less rapidly. All the batrachians possess external gills in their aquatic larval stage, and in a few forms, as the sirens and mud-puppies, gills are retained all through life. These gills are branched folds of the skin abundantly supplied with blood-vessels. In the organization of the batrachian body the usual vertebrate characters appear, the body-organs being arranged with reference to a supporting and protecting internal bony skeleton. The head is plainly set off from the rest of the body and bears the mouth and the organs of hearing and sight. Certain so-called lateral sense organs, the function of which is not exactly known, occur arranged in three lines on each side of the body of some of the forms. Both pairs of limbs are present and functional in almost all of the species. In the cœcilians the limbs are wholly wanting; in the sirens only the fore legs are present.