[Footnote 1: In a return of 112 coroners' inquests, in cases of death from wild animals, held in Ceylon in five years, from 1851 to 1855 inclusive, 68 are ascribed to the bites of serpents; and in almost every instance the assault is set down as having taken place _at night_. The majority of the sufferers were children and women.]
[Footnote 2: PLINY notices that the serpent has the sense of hearing more acute than that of sight; and that it is more frequently put in motion by the sound of footsteps than by the appearance of the intruder, "excitatur pede sæpius."--Lib. viii. c. 36.]
_The Python_.--The great python[1] (the "boa," as it is commonly designated by Europeans, the "anaconda" of Eastern story), which is supposed to crush the bones of an elephant, and to swallow the tiger, is found, though not of so portentous dimensions, in the cinnamon gardens within a mile of the fort of Colombo, where it feeds on hog-deer and other smaller animals.
[Footnote 1: Python reticulatus, _Gray_.]
The natives occasionally take it alive, and securing it to a pole expose it for sale as a curiosity. One which was brought to me in this way measured seventeen feet with a proportionate thickness: but another which crossed my path on a coffee estate on the Peacock Mountain at Pusilawa, considerably exceeded these dimensions. Another which I watched in the garden at Elie House, near Colombo, surprised me by the ease with which it erected itself almost perpendicularly in order to scale a wall upwards of ten feet high.
Of ten species which ascend the trees to search for squirrels and lizards, and to rifle the nests of birds, one half, including the green _carawilla_, and the deadly _tic polonga_, are believed by the natives to be venomous; but the fact is very dubious. I have heard of the cobra being found on the crown of a coco-nut palm, attracted, it was said, by the toddy which was flowing at the time, as it was the season for drawing it.
_Water-Snakes_.--The fresh-water snakes, of which four species have been described as inhabiting the still water and pools, are all harmless in Ceylon. A gentleman, who found near a river an agglutinated cluster of the eggs of one variety _(Tropidonotus umbratus)_, placed them under a glass shade on his drawing-room table, where one by one the young serpents emerged from the shell to the number of twenty.