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Flowers funnel-shaped, resembling Canterbury Bells, borne in a cluster on the summit of the plant; ovary short and scaly; petals joined at the base, and coloured a rosy-purple, dashed with yellow; the stamens fill the whole of the flower-tube and are white; style a little longer than the flower-tube, and bearing a ray of about a dozen stigmas.
"I mean, for instance, that if a person was to tell me that he had seen a mermaid, with the body of a woman and the scaly tail of a fish, I should at once say that I could not believe him. And why? because it is contrary to the laws of nature.
It burrows, digs open the ant-hills by night, projects a long viscous tongue among the insects, and devours them with avidity. When suddenly overtaken, and out of reach of its underground retreat, it "clews" up like the hedgehog, and some species of the South American armadillos to which last animal it bears a considerable resemblance on account of its scaly coat of mail.
But when the Gorgons saw the scaly carcass of Medusa, headless, and her golden wings all ruffled and half spread out on the sand, it was really awful to hear what yells and screeches they set up. And then the snakes! They sent forth a hundredfold hiss with one consent, and Medusa's snakes answered them out of the magic wallet.
The wind hurried them out from land, while it drove the sea-water in freezing spray over their backs and changed their fur garments into scaly armour, as they worked through the ice cakes, peering with strained eyes for a sign of their friends. The sailor, with deft strokes, steered them, between the grinding bergs, raising his voice in lone signals like the weird cry of a siren.
By them lay or hung game and poultry in select abundance, and a large part of the court was taken up by a tank in which the choicest of the scaly tribes of the Nile, and of the lakes of Northern Egypt, were swimming about as well as the Muraena and other fish of Italian breed. Alexandrian crabs and the mussels, oysters, and cray-fish of Canopus and Klysma were kept alive in buckets or jars.
Don't you remember how, when the dragon was infesting the neighborhood of Babylon, the citizens used to walk dismally out of evenings, and look at the valleys round about strewed with the bones of the victims whom the monster had devoured? O insatiate brute, and most disgusting, brazen, and scaly reptile! Let us be thankful, children, that it has not gobbled us up too. Quick.
There are quadrupeds that live exclusively on them, as the ant-bear, already described, and the pangolins, or scaly ant-eaters of the Eastern continent. There are birds, too, of many sorts that devour the ants; and there are even some who make them exclusively their food, as the genus Myothera, or "ant-catchers."
Out of a high wicker-work basket which stood by the fire there had risen a flat diamond-shaped head with wicked green eyes which came flickering upwards, waving gently from side to side, until a foot or more of glossy scaly neck was visible. Slowly the vicious head came floating up, while at every oscillation a fresh burst of shrieks came from the settee.
Go lose thyself in those continuous halls, Where strays the fond papa with son and daughter; And all that charms or startles or appals, Thou shalt behold, and for a single quarter. Far from the Barcan deserts now withdrawn, There, huge constrictors coil their scaly backs; There, cased in glass, malignant and unshorn, Old murderers glare in sullenness and wax.
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