Those ophidian families which prefer higher lands, sandy or rocky districts, select the sunny hill-sides when the frost sets in, and hide themselves under stones or in caves where, as described in the chapter on rattlesnakes, they congregate in vast numbers. Piles and convolutions of serpents in this condition have often been discovered, and as often described. It is as if the small degree of animal warmth each one possessed were harvested for their mutual good, and to the benefit of the whole community. Nor are these assemblages at all exclusive as to kind, but are dens of discordant materials, where, as an American wrote, ‘the liberal terms of admission seemed only to require the evidence of snakeship.’ Lizards, too, though of widely-branching kinship, are guided by the same instinct, and sometimes share the retreat. A few years ago, near Hayward’s Heath in Sussex, some men who were levelling the ground for building, dug out of a bank at a depth of from four to five feet, upwards of one hundred slow worms and as many small lizards, all in a torpid state. It was during February. At the end of September more recently, a farmer in Wales, who with his labourers was removing a heap of manure, came upon an extraordinary bed of snakes and slow worms, and no less than 352 were killed, together with an enormous quantity of eggs; ‘thousands in clusters were destroyed.’ Three of the snakes were of immense size, and one hundred of them nine to twelve inches long.’ These latter were probably slow worms, and the three ‘immense’ ones ring snakes. One feels curious to know whether judgment for this act of wanton cruelty visited that farmer in a destruction of his crops next year by the mice and insects from which these harmless reptiles would have saved them! The general reptilian instincts are the same in all climates where the temperature is similar. In Australia, as Krefft tells us, this is a grand time among schoolboys for ‘snake-hunting.’ They lay traps of large flat stones on open sunny ridges where the reptiles are likely to resort. Six to ten specimens of different species are often taken under one such stone. Even the venomous kinds may be easily captured and transferred to a bag in their half-dormant condition. Sometimes in lifting a stone, a dozen or more handsome and beautiful lizards are found among their ophidian cousins. The Wallaby hunters generally provide themselves with a collecting-bag, and thousands of snakes have thus been transferred to museums. So expert do the hunters become, that in eight years, the same author affirms, not one accident has occurred from a venomous species. From May to September in Australia, timid persons need be in no fear of snakes in the ‘scrub.’ The larger and more dangerous species retire deep into the ground, and only the young ones under stones. Warm days entice them out for an hour or two, and they retire again at night, just as is the case with those of the United States.