350 CLASS REPTILIA. 



officer, whose name we have just mentioned, has always found 

 fifty or sixty young ones in the bodies of such females as he 

 has had occasion to open. At the moment of their birth 

 these young ones are completely formed, very agile, ready to 

 bite, and six or eight inches in length. 



The habitat of the trigonocephaliis lanceolatus is very 

 much circumscribed. It does not extend throughout the 

 entire of the Archipelago of the Antilles, nor is it found 

 even in the majority of those islands which constitute that 

 Archipelago. By a chance equally singular, fortunate, and 

 inexplicable, it is confined to the islands of Martinique, St. 

 Lucia, and Beconia alone ; and there is no proof that, as has 

 been pretended, it is common in the American continent. 

 Nevertheless, a tradition exists among the Indigenes that it 

 was introduced into Martinique by the Arronages, a horde 

 which inhabited near the mouth of Orinoco, and which, im- 

 pelled by sentiments of hatred and vengeance against the 

 Carribs of that island, made them this fatal present, and let 

 loose in their forests this serpent, which was brought over in 

 calabashes. But according to another popular opinion in the 

 same country, the trigonocephalus is aboriginal of Martinico, 

 and cannot live elsewhere, not even in Guadaloupe. Some, 

 however, think differently, and explain the phenomenon by 

 the existence of the dog-headed serpent, which is believed to 

 be a boa, and which, common in Dominica and St. Vincent, 

 has delivered those islands from the trigonocephalus. 



Be all this as it may, it is very certain that this species is 

 greatly multiplied, at the present day, in St. Lucia and Mar- 

 tinique, where a field of sugar canes is never cut without 

 sixty or eighty of these serpents being found. They people 

 the marshes, the tilled grounds, the forests, the borders of 

 rivers, and the mountains, from the level of the sea to the 

 region of the clouds. They may be seen creeping in the 

 mud, struggling against the currents of rushing streams 



