Rhythms of a Desert Lizard

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Alfred Brown, an English immigrant to South Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century, was fascinated by large lizards, living and extinct. Officially, Brown was schoolmaster, as well as postmaster and librarian, of Aliwal North, a small frontier town northeast of Cape Town. Unofficially, he was Gogga ("vermin" in Afrikaans) Brown, the town's ardent, almost pathological, naturalist.

Between 1869 and 1909, Gogga Brown produced 10,000 pages of neat, handwritten notes on subjects ranging from meteorology to archeology, geology, and paleontology. But his most passionate interest by far was the local species of monitor lizard, the white-throated monitor, or leguaan (an …