The Orvet is found in woods and dry, sandy, and stony wastes. They are timid, harmless creatures, retiring into holes and concealing themselves in moss at the foot of trees to hide themselves from observation. They feed upon worms, insects, and the smaller mollusks. Although perfectly harmless, the country-people are strongly prejudiced against them, believing their bite to be a deadly poison. This animal is extremely brittle. Laurenti and others assert that when captured it throws itself into a position of such rigidity that it sometimes breaks in two, and that a smart blow of a switch will at any time divide it. [There are little-known species of _Anguis_ in India and South Africa, which are at least provisionally so considered, and certainly do not differ essentially; and next we come to forms in which the limbs are successively more developed. Such are the _Ophiodes striatus_ of Brazil, which has two short, flattened, undivided, and one-pointed limbs, corresponding to the usual hind pair; the _Brachymeles bonitæ_ of the Philippines, in which there are two pairs of short and rudimentary limbs, the fore bearing two minute claws, while the hind are undivided; _Venira bicolor_, of the same archipelago has very short limbs, the fore and hind being placed distantly apart, but in this genus all have five distinct toes; _Chiamelea lineata_, from some part of India, and _Hagria Vosmaërii_, from Bengal, are kindred forms which conduct to the genus _Eumeces_, the species of which are very numerous, and spread over nearly all the different countries between or near the tropics, and in certain of them (as the Burmese _E. anguinus_) the limbs are still remarkably diminutive, and (as in _E. isodactylus_ of Cambodia) the fore and hind limbs are placed very far apart, the body and tail being long and anguiform. In various other species of _Eumeces_, however, the proportions are more those of an ordinary Scink, as again in the kindred genera _Mabonia_ and _Plestiodon_, which are widely distributed.