Snakes.—­It is perhaps owing to the aversion excited by the ferocious expression and unusual action of serpents, combined with an instinctive dread of attack[1], that exaggerated ideas prevail both as to their numbers in Ceylon, and the danger to be apprehended from encountering them.  The Singhalese profess to distinguish a great many kinds, of which they say not more than one half have as yet been scientifically identified[2]; but so cautiously do serpents make their appearance, that the surprise of persons long resident is invariably expressed at the rarity with which they are to be seen; and from my own journeys through the jungle, often of from two to five hundred miles, I have frequently returned without observing a single snake.  Mr. Bennett, who resided much in the south-east of the island, ascribes the rarity of serpents in the jungle to the abundance of the wild peafowl, whose partiality to young snakes renders them the chief destroyers of these reptiles.  It is likely, too, that they are killed by the jungle-cocks; for they are frequently eaten by the common barn-door fowl in Ceylon.  This is rendered the more probable by the fact, that in those districts where the extension of cultivation, and the visits of sportsmen, have reduced the numbers of the jungle-cocks and pea-fowl, snakes have perceptibly increased.  The deer also are enemies of the snakes, and the natives who have had opportunities of watching their encounters assert that they have seen deer rush upon a serpent and crush it by leaping on it with all its four feet.  As to the venomous powers of snakes, DR. DAVY, whose attention was carefully directed to the poisonous serpents of Ceylon[3], came to the conclusion that but four, out of twenty species examined by him, were venomous, and that of these only two (the tic-polonga[4] and cobra de capello[5]) were capable of inflicting a wound likely to be fatal to man.  The third is the carawala[6], a brown snake of about two feet in length; and for the fourth, of which only a few specimens have been procured, the Singhalese have no name in their vernacular—­a proof that it is neither deadly nor abundant.  But Dr. Davy’s estimate of the venom of the carawala is below the truth, as cases have been authenticated to me, in which death from its bite ensued within a few days.  The effect, however, is not uniformly fatal; a circumstance which the natives explain by asserting that there are three varieties of the carawala, named the hil-la, the dunu, and the mal-carawala; the second being the largest and the most dreaded.

[Footnote 1:  Genesis iii. 15.]

[Footnote 2:  This is not likely to be true:  in a very large collection of snakes made in Ceylon by Mr. C.R.  Butler, and recently examined by Dr. Guenther, of the British Museum, only a single-specimen proved to be new.