The species which inhabits the fresh water is essentially cowardly in its instincts, and hastens to conceal itself on the appearance of man.  A gentleman (who told me the circumstance), when riding in the jungle, overtook a crocodile, evidently roaming in search of water.  It fled to a shallow pool almost dried by the sun, and, thrusting its head into the mud till it covered up its eyes, it remained unmoved in profound confidence of perfect concealment.  In 1833, during the progress of the Pearl Fishery, Sir Robert Wilmot Horton employed men to drag for crocodiles in a pond which was infested with them in the immediate vicinity of Aripo.  The pool was about fifty yards in length, by ten or twelve wide, shallowing gradually to the edge, and not exceeding four or five feet in the deepest part.  As the party approached the bund, from twenty to thirty reptiles, which had been basking in the sun, rose and fled to the water.  A net, specially weighted so as to sink its lower edge to the bottom, was then stretched from bank to bank and swept to the further end of the pond, followed by a line of men with poles to drive the crocodiles forward:  so complete was the arrangement, that no individual could evade the net, yet, to the astonishment of the Governor’s party, not one was to be found when it was drawn on shore, and no means of escape was apparent or possible except descending into the mud at the bottom of the pond.[1]

[Footnote 1:  A remarkable instance of the vitality of the common crocodile, C. biporcatus, was related to me by a gentleman at Galle:  he had caught on a baited hook an unusually large one, which his coolies disembowelled, the aperture in the stomach being left expanded by a stick placed across it.  On returning in the afternoon with a view to secure the head, they found that the creature had crawled for some distance, and made its escape into the water.]

TESTUDINATA. Tortoise,—­Of the testudinata the land tortoises are numerous, but present no remarkable features beyond the beautiful marking of the starred variety[1], which is common, in the north-western province around Putlam and Chilaw, and is distinguished by the bright yellow rays which diversify the deep black of its dorsal shield.  From one of these which was kept in my garden I took a number of flat ticks (Ixodes), which adhered to its fleshy neck in such a position as to baffle any attempt of the animal itself to remove them; but as they were exposed to constant danger of being crushed against the plastron during the protrusion and retraction of the head, each was covered with a horny case almost as resistant as the carapace of the tortoise itself.  Such an adaptation of structure is scarcely less striking than that of the parasites found on the spotted lizard of Berar by Dr. Hooker, each of which presented the distinct colour of the scale to which it adhered.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Testudo stellata, Schweig.]