We see those strange forms reproduced in the gardens of the Crystal Palace. Lizards with the head of a bird and other combinations, the Pterosauria or winged-lizards, Ichthyosauria or fish-lizards, of which some representative types still exist in the African _Lepidosiren_ and the Mexican _Axolotl_, which have puzzled modern physiologists as much as the Carolina tortoise puzzled Lawson; for whether to call them reptiles or fishes was long a disputed question. Dr. Carpenter, in his _Zoology_, reckons fifty-eight of such links among reptiles; as, for instance, the transition from turtles to crocodiles, from tortoises to lizards, in which latter we find the legs growing shorter, till they are gone altogether in the blindworms and amphisbænas. These again branch off to the cecilias, and the cecilias to worms on one side, and to frogs on the other, having the form of a snake, but the skin of the batrachian. There are the Ophiosaurians, snake-lizards, and Saurophidians, lizard-snakes; there are lizard-like frogs and frog-like lizards; some of them beginning life with gills, and becoming air-breathers afterwards, others of saurian aspect retaining their gills through life; and from these, again, is the transition between reptiles and fishes. There are diminutive snakes of worm-like aspect, and gigantic worms which might be mistaken for snakes; and among modern naturalists, that is to say within one hundred years, worms have been classed with reptiles when none such enormous species as those lately found in Africa were dreamed of. There is in no branch of zoology so much confusion as in herpetology; and if the reader will, with a sweep of the imagination, embrace the innumerable forms that come under the class _Reptilia_, their various coverings, and their close gradations, he will not wonder at this. Let us glance at a few of the systems adopted by Linnæus and others of his time, who, we must remember, had to combat not only inherited ideas of ‘creeping things,’ but the difficulties presented by badly stuffed or bottled specimens; the latter often having been so long in alcohol that their colours had flown, or their covering changed in texture. The Atlantic was not crossed in a week in those days; and three months, instead of three weeks, barely sufficed to reach India, to say nothing of inland journeys when you got there. If foreign specimens came home after the manipulations of a taxidermist, he had done his very best to render them as hideous as tradition painted them. Sometimes a wooden head on a stuffed body; teeth that might furnish the jaws of the largest felines, and a tongue to match; while with external cleansings, scrapings, and polishings, it were hard to discover what manner of skin had originally clothed the creature.