184 THE HERPETOLOGY OF CUBA. 



labial; rings on the body 204, rings on the tail fourteen; the segments of each 

 ring longer than broad on the back, broader than long on the belly, fourteen 

 above and sixteen below the lateral line; anal shields, eight; preanal pores, 

 five (normally and almost invariably four). 



Colour (in hfe) : — Rather light brown, ahnost all of each segment being 

 covered by a square dark brown spot. These spots appear on but a part of 

 the ventral segments, giving the body a mottled appearance. Head uniform 

 brown. 



Dimensions: — Total length 194 mm. 



Vent to tip of tail 14 mm. 



Like all West Indian amphisbaenians, A. cuhana has always been rare in 

 museums. Boulenger had no specimens when he wrote the British Musexmi 

 Catalogue and presumed that the species was really the same as caeca from 

 Porto Rico, as he considered the fusion of the ocular with second supralabial, 

 although present in both types, to be an anomaly. Stejneger recorded two 

 other specimens showing this same, curious character and concluded in his 

 Herpetology of Porto Rico (1904) that the species was vaUd. That Stejneger 

 is correct has been shown by the very large series collected by the senior author 

 in 1910 at Soledad, and another series equally large received in 1915 from Mr. 

 R. M. Grey of the Harvard Botanical Station. The species can be secured in 

 numbers by persistently following the ploughman at work preparing the cane- 

 fields for replanting. The seciu-ing of a series is merely a matter of time. 

 Although many specimens of Typhlops lumbricalis and of Leimadophis andreae 

 were secured in this same way, no specimen of Cadea was ever found near 

 Soledad. Following ploughs in other parts of the Island has not been equally 

 successful and none were obtained at Senor Francisco Morales's plantation near 

 the Rio Hanabana in the Cienaga de Zapata. Although apparently so locally 

 distributed the species, nevertheless, has very considerable range, for the U. S. 

 N. M. has received it from Matanzas far to the west of Cienfuegos, while speci- 

 mens have been collected on the plantation of San Carlos near Guantanamo in 

 extreme eastern Cuba (Ramsden) and near Havana (Barbour). In January, 

 1917 a few were found under stones on the floor of a heavy lowland forest. 

 This was while enjoying the hospitaUty of Mr. Walter Wilcox whose mahogany 

 cutting is on the east shore of the Ensenada de Cochinos, at Caleta Rosario 

 (Barbour). Young specimens, but three or four inches long and very slender, 

 are by no means rare, but so far we have no information regarding the egg- 

 laying or breeding habits in general of either of the Cuban amphisbaenians. 



