CHAMELEON, cameleo , small animal of the type of animals with four legs which lay eggs, like the crocodile and the lizard, with which it has much resemblance. See Natural history Plate XV, fig. 2 . [1] We cannot do better for the history of the chameleon than to relate here what M. Formey, secretary of the Prussian Royal Academy of Sciences and Literature, has written in a manuscript which was communicated to us.

“The chameleon is shaped like the lizard, except it has a larger and wider head. It has four feet, each with three fingers; a long tail, with which it clings to trees as well as with its feet; it helps it climb, and when it cannot reach a place where it wishes to go with its feet, if it can touch it with the tip of its tail it climbs there easily. It moves slowly like the turtle, but very deliberately. Its tail is flat, its muzzle long; its back is sharp, the skin folded and bristly like a saw, from the neck to the last knot of the tail, and a manner of crest on the head. The chameleon has a head without a neck, like fish. It produces eggs, like lizards; its muzzle comes to an obtuse point; it has two little openings in the head that serve as its nostrils; its eyes are big, and are more than five lines in diameter,  [2] with a light tan iris and a golden ring around it; and as its head is nearly immobile, and it can turn only with its whole body, nature has compensated it for this inconvenience by giving its eyes all sorts of movements: for it can not only look in front of itself with one and behind with the other, up with one and down with the other; but it moves them independently of each other with all imaginable changes. Its tongue is ten lines long and three wide, made of white flesh, round, and flattened on the end, where it is hollow and open, somewhat like an elephant’s trunk. It shoots and withdraws it quickly on flies, which are caught on it as in glue; it eats them, and is well filled with just few of them, although it expels a lot of excrement. It is even said that it lives a long time with no food other than air, with which it fills up in the sunlight until it is swollen. It has no ears and neither receives nor emits any sound. It has eighteen ribs, and its spine has seventy-four vertebrae, including the fifty of its tail. It sometimes becomes so thin that its ribs can be counted, which is why Tertullian calls it a living skin . When it finds itself in danger of being caught, it opens its mouth and hisses like a viper. Gesner and Aldrovande say that it defends itself from the serpent with a piece of straw which it holds in its mouth. [3]

“The chameleon lives among rocks. What is most marvelous about it is the change of color it manifests at the approach of certain objects. It is ordinarily green, tending to brown on the two shoulders, and yellow-green under the stomach, with sometimes red and sometimes white spots. Its green color often changes to a dark brown, with nothing being left of the first color; the white spots also disappear sometimes, or simply change into a darker color shading toward violet, which happens ordinarily when it is frightened. When it sleeps under a white covering it becomes white, but never red or blue; it also becomes green, brown, or black if covered by those colors. Such are at least the ordinary accounts that have been given of this phenomenon; but it appears exaggerated to me, and before undertaking to explain it, the fact must be solidly verified. The Minim Father Feuillée, for example, maintains in his Journal of physical, mathematical, and botanical observations , [4] that this animal’s change of colors comes from the various viewpoints from which it is seen, which is not at all as marvelous as what the Ancients had published ( Mémoires de Trevoux, August 1727, page 1419 ). [5] M. Souchu de Rennefort assures us in his Histoire des Indes Orientales [ History of the East Indies ] that chameleons take through their eyes the colors of the objects on which they pause ( Histoire des ouvrages des Savans, March 1688, vol. II, p. 308 .) [6] Another writer advances that it is not true that the chameleon changes color according to the things on which it finds itself; but the change takes place, according to him, following the different qualities of the cold or hot air about it ( Recueil d’Histoire et de Litterature , vol. III, p. 73 ). [7] Mademoiselle de Scudéry, [8] in an account she published about two chameleons that were brought to her from Africa, asserts that she kept them for ten months, and during that time they ate nothing at all. They were placed in the sun and open air, which seemed to be their sole nourishment; they often changed color without assuming the color of the things on which they were placed. It was observed only that when they were variegated, the color they were on mixed with the others, which by their frequent changes made an agreeable effect ( Furetière, article “Cameleon” ). [9] All these diversities would require a more careful examination, which would spare us the trouble of looking for explanations for what perhaps does not exist. Yet several have been proposed: some say that the change of colors takes place by suffusion, others by reflection, others by the arrangement of the particles that make up its skin. It is transparent, says Father Regnault ( Entretiens de Physique, vol. IV, p. 182 ) [10] and encloses a transparent humor that reflects colored rays, sort of like a thin blade of horn or glass. Matthiole recounts several superstitions of the Ancients concerning the chameleon : they said that its tongue which had been torn out while it was alive, made the person who carried it win his lawsuit; that thunder and rain would result if its head and throat were burned in oak; or if its liver was roasted on a red tile; that if its right eye were ripped out while it was alive, that eye put into goat milk removed leucomas; that its tongue tied to a pregnant woman made her give birth without danger; that its right jaw took away all fear from those who carried it on their person, and that its tail stopped rivers. Which shows that naturalists have told tales as imaginary as the poets. [11]

“In Egypt there are chameleons eleven or twelve inches long, including the tail; those of Arabia and Mexico are only six inches long.”

No one knows why the Greeks gave names as lovely as little-lion or camel-lion to such a vile and ugly animal. But it has been surmised that it was because it has a crest on its head like the lion; but this crest only appears on the lion’s head after the muscles of the temples have been removed. [12] It has also been suggested that it is because the chameleon catches flies the way the lion hunts and devours other animals that it has been compared to the lion, like the antlion .

Chameleons have legs longer than the crocodile and the lizard, yet they walk easily only on trees. Living ones have been observed that had been brought from Egypt. The largest had a head one inch and ten lines long. It was four and a half inches from the head to the beginning of the tail. The feet were each two and a half inches long, and the tail was five inches. The girth of the body was different at different times: it was sometimes two inches from the back to below the stomach; at other times it was scarcely more than one inch, because the body of the animal contracted and dilated. These movements were not only in the thorax and the stomach, but also in the arms, legs, and tail; they did not follow those of respiration, for they were irregular as in turtles, frogs, and lizards. We have seen here chameleons remain swollen for over two hours, and remain deflated for a little longer; in this state they appear so skinny that one would think they had nothing but skin applied over their skeletons. These sorts of contractions and dilatations can only be attributed to the air which the animal breathes, but we do not know how it can be distributed throughout the body between the skin and the muscles; for it would appear that air forms the swelling as in the frog. Although the chameleon which was observed looked very thin when it was deflated, one still could not feel a heartbeat. The skin was cold to the touch, uneven, raised in little bumps like the chamois, yet still fairly soft, because the grains were smooth; the arms, legs, stomach and tail were the size of a pinhead; on the shoulders and the head they were a little bigger and oval in shape. There were some under the throat that were higher and more pointed; they were aligned like prayer beads from the lower lip to the chest. The grains of the back and the head were in groups of two, three, four, five, six, and seven; the intervals between these little clumps were scattered with almost imperceptible grains.

When the chameleon had been in the shade and at rest for a long while, the color of all these grains on its skin was a bluish-gray, except for the underside of the feet, which were a slightly yellowish white, and the intervals between the clumps of grains of the back and the head were a yellowish pale red, like the underlying skin.

The gray color of the chameleon changed when it was exposed to sunlight. All the places which it struck took on, instead of their bluish-gray, a more brownish-gray, shading toward minime ; [13] the rest of the skin changed its gray into several bright colors that formed blotches the size of half a finger; some came down from the crest of the spine to the middle of the back. There were others on the sides, the arms, and the tail; their color was light tan from the mixture of a pale yellow which the grains took on and a light red which was the color of the underlying skin between the grains. The rest of this skin, which was not exposed to sunlight and had remained a gray paler than usual, was like fabrics blended from wools of several colors, for one could see some of the grains of a slightly greenish gray, others of minimal gray, and others of a bluish gray as they are ordinarily; the background remained red as before. When the chameleon was not exposed to the sunlight, the first gray returned slowly over the whole body, except the underside of the feet, which kept its first color, with a touch of additional brown. When it was touched, several black spots the width of a fingernail immediately appeared; sometimes it became all blotched with greenish-brown patches. After being wrapped in a cloth for two or three minutes it became whitish, or rather a very pale gray, which it gradually lost some time later. This experiment only succeeded once, although it was repeated several times on different days; we tried it also on other colors, but the animal did not take them on. One could believe that it paled in white cloth only because it found itself in the dark, and because the cloth was cold like the air, which was colder the day of this experiment than on the other days when it was repeated.

The head of this chameleon was rather like that of a fish, because it had a very short neck, covered on the sides with two cartilaginous plates rather like a fish’s gills. There was a raised, straight crest atop the head, two others above the eyes, shaped like an S lying down; and between these two crests two cavities along the underside of the head. The muzzle formed an obtuse point, and the lower jaw was further forward than the upper one. On the end of the muzzle was a hole on each side for the nostrils, and it seems likely that these holes also served for hearing. The jaws were furnished with teeth, or rather it was a jagged bone, that did not appear to serve for chewing, because the animal swallowed the flies and other insects it caught without chewing them. The mouth opening extended two lines beyond the opening of the jaws, and this continuation of the opening continued down obliquely.

The thorax was very long compared to the belly. The four feet were alike, or if there was some difference it was that the forelegs were bent backwards and the hind legs forward, so one might say they were four arms with their elbows inside, there being in each the arm bone and the two bones of the forearm. The four feet were each composed of five toes, and looked rather more like hands than feet. They were nevertheless of the same width, the toes which were two by two being fatter than those which were three by three. These toes were enclosed in the same skin, as in a mitten, and were not separated from each other, but appeared only through the skin. The arrangement of these feet was different in that the front feet had two toes pointed outward and three inward, contrary to the hind feet, which had three outward and two inward.

With these feet it grasped the small branches of trees, just like the parrot, which in order to perch spreads its toes differently from most birds, which always put three forward and one behind, whereas the parrot puts two both behind and forward.

The nails were a little hooked, very sharp, and pale yellow, and were only half exposed beyond the skin; the other half was hidden and wrapped up underneath. They were in all two and a half lines long.

The chameleon walked more slowly than a turtle, although its legs were longer and less encumbered. It has been believed that animals of this type could go faster, and suspected that it is timidity that prevents them. The tail of the one we observed looked rather like a viper, or the tail of a large rat, when it was swollen; otherwise it took on the shape of the vertebrae over which the skin lies. When the animal was on trees, it curled its tail around branches, and when it walked held it parallel to the plane on which it was set, and only rarely allowed it to drag on the ground.

We saw it catch flies and other insects with its long tongue; we found these same flies and worms in the stomach and intestines; it is true that it excreted them almost as whole as it had caught them, but we know that happens with other animals that have never been suspected of living on air like the chameleon . This prejudice is not better founded than the one that relates to the changing of colors which has been said to occur by touching different things which it approaches. ( Mémoires de l'Académie royale des Sciences, vol. III, part 1, pp. 35 ff. ) See Quadruped.

1. In fact, Plate XXV, oviparous quadrupeds, fig. 3.

2. A line is one-twelfth of an inch, in printer’s terms 6 points or ½ pica, or 3.175 mm.

3. The references are to the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) and Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), prolific Italian naturalist.

4. Louis Éconches Feuillée (1660–1732), published two volumes under this title in 1714, based on his travels to the Caribbean and the east coast of South America. The Minims are a religious order founded by Saint Francis of Paul in the fifteenth century.

5. The reference is to a review of Feuillée’s work published in the Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux arts (August 1727), commonly referred to then as now as the Mémoires de Trévoux .

6. Souchu de Rennefort (c. 1630-c. 1690), Histoire des Indes orientales (Leiden, 1688). The reference is to a review of this work in Henri Basnage de Beauval (1656-1710), Histoire des ouvrages des Savans (Rotterdam, 1688), 2:307-11.

7. We are unable to identify the source for this citation. – ed.

8. Madeleine de Scudéry (1607–1701), one of the seventeenth century’s major novelists.

9. Much of this contribution by Formey in fact comes directly from this article in the Dictionnaire universel (1690) of Antoine Furetière (1620–1688). The article in question can be found in volume 3, 251-

10. Noël Regnault (1683–1762), Entretiens physiques d’Ariste et d’Eudoxe, ou physique nouvelle en dialogues , vol. IV, 1732.

11. The reference seems to be to the Italian naturalist, Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577). This discussion of him comes verbatim from Furetière.

12. I.e., in dissection; so it is apparently not to the mane that he refers.

13. I.e., the dark tan color of the habit worn by the monks of this religious order, according to the Dictionnaire of the French Academy (1694).