The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-08-23

final wild dive carries the body of the lizard out of danger and the eagle succeeds in clutching only the long, ta- pering tail Now fierce struggle en- lsues, but ends in a moment, with the llgnana shooting into the fartheSt end of his tunnel. while the eagle flies off carrying in it's talons long piece of tall, perhaps one-third as long as the 1 entire lizard
 TAILS GROWN TO ORDER.
 This the eagle finds but poor pick Ilngs," as it is chiefly bone and hard |scaly skin. Our sympathles are all
 With the poor, panting iguana in It's subterranean home, doomed one would think, to slow lingering death. But, | thanks his anatomy, such is not the case, and he may live many a long day. The facts are these: The mus cles of the tail are very numerous, but short and they dove-tail together at each tail joint, In the embryo ignana ' the tail vertebrae are all soft and car- | tilaginous and when the bone is later l deposited a deep wedge of this primi- | tive cartilage remains across the cen tre of each little bone. Now this
 would be a total anatomical defect if the creature trusted to its tail to de- liver telling blows as does the alliga- tor, or if it used it to curl about a | limb like fifth hand, as Is the case in true chameleons. But the tail of an iguana is never put to such severe i strains and seems only an aid in swim ming and as We have seen above in such tragedies as this of spare me, | take my tail' character. So when an enemy such as the eagle seizes this ap- bondage, a few hard pulls serve to con- i tinue the undiscovered crack and then { the weekly jointed muscles give way and off comes the tail. The muscles now close together so that only a few drps of blod are lost and in a day or 1 two the wound is healed. But now be- gins the most interesting process of all A new tail begins to appear and it grows until it is of a very respectable length, although not so long as the original one. If again gripped by an enemy the new appendage would in turn be lost, taking with it one more joint of the tail stump. This new tail, however useful it may prove in such circumstances is nevertheless only a false tail. It has no true bones in it, Ionly a long core of cartilage and the scales on its skin are small and sim Iple; curiously enough they are exactly l like the scales which the ancestors of the iguanas possessed. But this does not trouble the iguana. He has new and serviceable tail, and that is all that concerns him.
 AN EXTRA TAIL SOMETIMES.
 The tail-producing growth is so pro- nounced in these iguanas that, if their tail be only injured on one side, tiny new tail will sometimes sprout, which probably proves more of an inconven- fence than help, and from a tail stump two new tails have been known to sprout simultaneously
 So when we watch the captive igua- na of our Geological Park, some with ] well-shaped tapering tails, and thers with shorter, blunter ones covered f with small scales, we know what lmakes the difference; and as we look into the keen upturned eyes of the owners of the latter we wish that they could tell us the history of their de- tailment whether eagle, ocelot or boa was their assailant.
 The flesh of iguanas Is white and clean, making delicious eating, tasting hike tender chicken, the drawback be- ling the limited amount, the body and tail being all skin and bone, the legs alone furnishing enough meat to cook. -c. William Beebe in the New York Evening Post.