Accounts of the habits and habitat, by various authors, indicate versatility in behavior, and adaptation to a variety of habitat conditions in different climates and plant associations. Some of the differences evidently result from the skink's tendency to maintain itself in surroundings of favorable temperature and humidity, which obviously are to be found in different types of situations at different extremes of the range. Hence even though the skink itself may remain unchanged, it tends to behave somewhat differently under diverse environmental conditions. Such environmentally enforced differences in habits would be difficult to distinguish from those having a genetic basis. Although no subspecies of _Eumeces fasciatus_ have been recognized, local populations undoubtedly differ somewhat in size and other characters that have a genetic basis. At the northern edge of its geographic range, _fasciatus_ occurs in isolated colonies and seems to be restricted to open, rocky situations which receive the maximum amount of sunlight. Breckenridge (1944:96) wrote that at the two Minnesota localities representing the northwestern corner of the known range, the skinks were found at granite outcrops, and he mentions one found in western Wisconsin, at Taylor Falls, under an 18-inch slab of a basalt outcrop in sparse oak woods. Patch (1934:51) described a habitat at Arden, Ontario, among massive granite-gneiss domes, with sparse vegetation. At Point Pelee, Ontario, the species is common in the drier, more sparsely wooded situations, hiding beneath loose bark of stumps and logs.