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.

The use of the Pamboo-Kaloo, or snake-stone, as a remedy in cases of
wounds by venomous serpents, has probably been communicated to the
Singhalese by the itinerant snake-charmers who resort to the island from
the coast of Coromandel; and more than one well-authenticated instance
of its successful application has been told to me by persons who had
been eye-witnesses to what they described. On one occasion, in March,
1854, a friend of mine was riding, with some other civil officers of the
government, along a jungle path in the vicinity of Bintenne, when they
saw one of two Tamils, who were approaching them, suddenly dart into the
forest and return, holding in both hands a cobra