SOME NEW ASIAN SNAKES. 



615 



The following scheme should assist the identification of the species, 

 — in fact I think is even preferable to that usually adopted in a key. 



Here I may remark that many people appear to expect a key to 

 direct them unerringly in every case to the object of their enquiry, 

 but the disciple of Darwin on a little reflection must see how impossible 

 it is to fulfil such expectations, for it is only through variation that 

 the evolution doctrine can be accepted. Whether the variation is 

 retrograde —a reversion to an ancestral type, — or progressive — a 



* A caution must here be offered to the novice, to count these shields very carefully. It is 

 very easy to omit counting the last, and to prevent this the mouth should be well opened 

 to show the extreme limit of the gape. Again it is often easy to overlook the contact of the 

 3rd with the eye, ami it will be seen by a glance at the scheme how either of these mistakes 

 will misdirect the enquirer. 



t A most critical examination of these two species side by side reveals to me no other 

 shield difference but that already referred to in connection with the postnasal. Recourse had 

 better be had therefore to colour only. In flavomaculatus the jet black ground with the 

 white flank bars, and reticulation, and the brilliant yellow vertebral spots are very striking 

 and characteristic. In jara the ground colour is brown, and each scale has a pair of small 

 whitish (Theobald says yellow) spots at its apex. It is doubtful whether habitat will help 

 in discriminating between the two ; for although the only authentic localities where flavoma- 

 culatus has been met with are confined to a moderately elevated region in the Bombay 

 Presideney, the fact that there was a specimen in the Fyzabad Museum, though its 

 habitat is known, suggests a wider distribution. Jara has been met with in Malabar, 

 the Anamally Hills, Sikkim, Himalayas, Ganjam, Calcutta, Pegu and recently the Bombay 

 Natural History Society has acquired its first specimen, the habitat bein^ Tindaria (Kurseong) 

 on the Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway. 



