igarto_, to alligator. The prefix may
have arisen as a corruption of an article and a noun, as in the modern
Spanish _el lagarto_,--a lizard.

Monitor is Latin for one who reminds, these lizards being so called
because they are supposed to give warning of the approach of crocodiles.
Asp can be carried back to the _aspis_ of the Romans, no trace being found
in the dim vistas of preceding tongues.

Gecko, the name of certain wall-hunting lizards, is derived from their
croaking cry; while iguana is a Spanish name taken from the old native
Haytian appellation _biuana_.

Of the word frog we know nothing, although through the medium of many
languages it has had as thorough an evolution as in its physical life. We
must also admit our ignorance in regard to toad, backward search revealing
only _tade_, _tode_, _ted_, _toode_, and _tadie_, the root baffling all
study. Polliwog and tadpole are delightfully easy. Old forms of polliwog
are _pollywig_, _polewiggle_, and _pollwiggle_. This last gives us the
clew to our spelling--_pollwiggle_, which, reversed and interpreted in a
modern way, is wigglehead, a most appropriate name for these lively little
black fellows. Tadpole is somewhat similar; toad-pole, or toad's-head,
also very apt when we think of these small-bodied larval forms.

Salamander, which is a Greek word of Eastern origin, was applied in the
earliest times to a lizard considered to have the power of extinguishing
fire. Newt has a strange history; originating in a wrong division of two
words, "_an ewte_," the latter being derived from _eft_, which is far more
correct than newt, though in use now in only a few places. Few fishermen
have ever thought of the interesting derivation of the names which they
know so well. Of course there are a host of fishes named from a fancied
resemblance to familiar terrestrial animals or other things; such as the
catfish, and those named after the dog, hog, horse, cow, trunk, devil,
angel, sun, and moon.

The word fish has passed through many varied forms since it was _piscis_
in the old Latin tongue, and the same is true of shark and skate, which in
the same language were _carcharus_ and _squatus_. Trout was originally
_tructa_, which in turn is lost in a very old Greek word, meaning eat or
gnaw. Perch harks back to the Latin _perca_, and the Romans had it from
the Greeks, among whom it meant spotted. The Romans said _minutus_ when
they meant small, and nowadays when we speak of any ve