A POPULAR TREATISE ON THE COMMON INDIAN SNAKES. 791 



Habits. — Its springing (" flying ") habit is, I think, clearly esta- 

 blished. Shelford, who remarked upon this extraordinary habit* 

 mentioned Demlrophis pictus as one of the species credited by the 

 natives of Sarawak with the power of springing, and Dr. Annan- 

 dale writing to me some time back told me that he had witnessed 

 the flight of a Bendrophis pictus between two trees in the Malay 

 States, and caught the snake in his butterfly net. 



Food. — The only specimen of eight collected in Burma which 

 had recently fed, contained a tree frog, and Flower has known 

 liana macrodactyla, a marsh frog taken. I suspect that its gas- 

 tronomic tastes are much the same as those of tristis. 



Breeding. — I have no breeding events to chronicle from any source. 



Distribution, (a) Geographical. — Variety typica, occurs in the 

 Eastern Hima^as about Sikkim up to an altitude of about 4,000 

 feet, probably the plains of Eastern Bengal, but I am not certain 

 of this, Assam probably, f but I am not certain; one specimen I 

 collected I referred with some doubt to this species, the Irrawadcby- 

 Salween Basins (The Andamans, Nicobars and Cocos?)4 Indo- 

 China, Malay Peninsula, and the Malay Archipelago from Sumatra 

 to the Philippines. 



It is impossible to say whether the snake reported by Stoliczka§ 

 as common in the HimaWas, in Kumaon and Sutlej is pictus or 

 tristis. I have never met with a specimen from the Western Hima- 

 layas, and this is the only allusion I can find of such in literature. 



* Prol. Zool. Soc. Lond., 1906, p. 227. 



f The common species in this province is proarchos (Wall) which is described in 

 a paper appearing in this Number (p. 827) on the snakes of Assam. 



% I have lately received a specimen from the Andamans from Dr. N. Annandale. 

 In colouration and markings it was very like tristis, except that there was no inter- 

 parietal spot, and no light vertebral streak. Having prepared the skull I find 

 that it combines the character of pictus and tristis, and this being so, I think one 

 has no course open to one but to concede to it the rank of a very closely allied but 

 distinct species. I await further specimens before describing this in detail. 



§ My reasons for doubting this record are that at least six other Himalo- Burmese 

 snakes are recorded from South India on the sole authority of Beddome ; these are 

 Tropidonotus parallelus, T. subminiatus, himalayanus, Lycodon jara, Simotes 

 splendidus, and Bungarus fasciatus. Beddome evidently received snakes from the 

 Eastern Himalayas and Burma because he presented the following snakes to the 

 British Museum from these localities : Simotes albocinctus, S. cruentatus, and Dip- 

 sadomorphus hexagonotus. It seems probable, therefore, that the six species first 

 enumerated and also a Dendrophis pictus were likewise collected in Burma or the 

 Eastern Himalayas, and inadvertently mixed with his South Indian collections. 



