Researches in natural history Author:John Murray Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE CHAMELEON INTRODUCTORY REMARKS VA- RIOUS OPINIONS. — PHENOMENA OF CHANGE, BY VARIOUS OBSERVERS. DIFFERENT DEDUCTIONS. THE TEMPERATURE... more » OF THE CHANGING SHADES AND SPOTS ADDUCED AS A PROOF OF THEIR DEPENDENCE ON CIRCULATION. ANALOGICAL PHENOMENA. The chameleon is a curious and interesting animal, and exhibits features of a very unusual kind. The earlier naturalists could not well overlook a character so extraordinary; and it found a place in their pages. Fable has drawn on its changes, and poetry has consecrated these wonders by the witchery of song; neither is there a more singular train of phenomena, nor a problem of more difficult solution. Its physiology is of no ordinary kind; and the singular mutability to which the creature is subject involves a question of an uncommon complexion. The Chanuzleo vulgaris, or common chameleon, is a native of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Its wonderful changes have excited attention in every age, and become proverbial. This remarkable phenomenon is not exclusively peculiar to the chameleon; for it would appear that both the agama and polychlorus occasionally display various colours, even the deep black which the chameleon sometimes assumes occurs also in them. To account for these changeable hues, seems to have exhausted the imagination and ingenuity of the observers. Thus, Linnaeus and Hasselquist thought they arose from jaundice ; Kircher, from the imagination of the animal; Solinus, from reflection ; Wormius, from the affections of the mind, an opinion nearly that of LacSpede; Shaw and the French academicians, from exposure to the sun. Pliny and Russel concur that the animal takes the colour of the body with which it may happen to be in contact. D'Obsonville, Dumeril, Cuvier, Barrow, and the authors in Rees's C...« less