188 



ZOOLOGY. 



[PART H. 



The species that inhabits fresh water is essentially 

 cowardly in its instincts, and hastens to conceal itself 

 on the appearance of man. A gentleman (who told 

 me the circumstance), when riding in the jungle, over- 

 took a crocodile, evidently roaming in search of water. 

 It fled to a shallow pool almost dried by the sun, 

 and, thrusting its head into the mud till it covered 

 up its eyes, remained unmoved in profound confidence 

 of perfect concealment. In 1833, during the progress 

 of the Pearl Fishery, Sir Eobert Wilmot Horton em- 

 ployed men to drag for crocodiles in a pond which 

 was infested with them in the immediate vicinity of 

 Aripo. The pool was about fifty yards in length, by 

 ten or twelve wide, shallowing gradually to the edge, 

 and not exceeding four or five feet in the deepest 

 part. As the party approached the bund, from twenty 

 to thirty reptiles, which had been basking in the sun, 

 rose and fled to the water. A net, specially weighted 

 so as to sink its lower edge to the bottom, was then 

 stretched from bank to bank and swept to the 

 further end of the pond, followed by a line of men 

 with poles to drive the crocodiles forward: so com- 

 plete was the arrangement, that no individual could 

 evade the net, yet, to the astonishment of the Governor's 

 party, not one was to be found when it was drawn 

 on shore, and no means of escape for them was apparent 

 or possible except descending into the mud at the bottom 

 of the pond. 1 



TESTUDINATA. Tortoise. Of the testudinata the land 

 tortoises are numerous, but present no remarkable 

 features beyond the beautiful marking of the starred 

 variety 2 , which is common in the north-western province 



1 A remarkable instance of the vi- 

 tality of the common crocodile, C. bi- 

 porcatus, was related to me by a 

 gentleman at Galle : he had caught 

 on a baited hook an unusually large 

 one, which his coolies disembowelled, 

 the aperture in the stomach being left 



expanded by a stick placed across it. 

 On returning in the afternoon with a 

 view to secure the head, they found 

 that the creature had crawled for 

 some distance, and made its escape 

 into the water. 



8 Testudo stellata, Schiveig. 



