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 life): — Rather light brown, almost 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. cubana has always been rare in 
museums. Boulenger had no specimens when he wrote the British Museum 
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 valid. 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 securing of a series is merely a matter of time. 
Although many specimens of T'yphlops 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 Sefior 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. 8. 
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 hospitality 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. 
