Lizards perhaps more than any other group of backboned animals become part and parcel of their surroundings in form and color. We sometimes found dull gray and green fellows on the trunks of trees or the ends of half rotten logs, which almost defied the efforts of the eye to disentangle them from the lichens and moss amid which they clung. When one of these did move it was with such celerity that the eye unconsciously swept onward, impelled by momentum, and overshot the spot where it stopped. Then another careful search was necessary to rediscover the reptile. [Illustration: FIG. 22. LIZARD ALERT ON TRUNK OF TREE.] This same glade was the favorite haunt of two kinds of small Manakins, the Gold-headed[108] and the White-breasted.[111] The former was a mite of a bird, barely four inches in length, jet-black as to body and wings, but with a cap of gold pulled down over his head and ears. If his eyes were black and beady like those of his near relatives, the harmony of his head-dress would be disturbed, so Dame Nature has sifted the gold over his eyes as well, and the yellow irides are almost invisible among the feathers. Such coloring renders him part of his beloved gorge. If he sits in the shade his body vanishes and his head is naught but a spot of sunshine; if his perch is in sunlight, the tiny, headless body conveys no hint of a living bird. His cousin, the White-breasted, is black and white and the four outer feathers of the wing are very narrow and curved. These are the strings upon which he plays an æolian song of love, for every time he takes to flight a loud humming sound is produced. The females are dull olive in color but easily recognizable by their orange feet and legs. Sometimes three suitors would buzz and hum together about one of these sombre little ladies in the gloom of the gorge. [Illustration: FIG. 23. THE SAME LIZARD A MOMENT LATER, OBLITERATED BY CHANGE OF POSITION.] The rotten trees and palm stubs were filled with interesting insects; big black palm weevils (_Rhyncophorus palmatum_) an inch and a half long, and huge brown cockroaches three inches from head to wing-tip (_Blaberus trapezoideus_). With a machete we cut open one log, which was like bread in consistency, and found two centipedes, three scorpions, one of them a whip scorpion, a huge beetle larva, a small snake, with a faint band about its neck (_Homalocranium melanocephalum_) and most interesting of all, a Peripatus.