NOTHS ON THE ORIGIN OF THE BELIEY IN THE BIS-COBRA. 155 
result a their enquiries. You all know what treatment Galileo 
received for having ascertained the earth’s movement. If we were 
to judge of the result arrived at then through our present know- 
ledge of astronomical subjects, we should be astonished at the 
condemnation of Galileo by the Inquisitors at Rome for his discovery, 
which forms the basis of all the astronomical calculations of the 
present day. But then we must remember that the fact occurred in 
the year 1615, when superstition and religious autocracy reigned 
supreme. History has sent down to us accounts of facts which were 
exaggerated according to the feelings and ways of observation of 
the writers who wrote when those facts occurred, or were supposed 
to have occurred. Cobra-de-Capello itself had once been fabulously 
described and painted in Italy with more hairs on its ee than a 
bear has. Capello in the Italian language means hair and a hood as 
well. In giving the description of the cobra, the writer, who had 
never seen a Cobra-de-Capello before, said that it had long, thick 
and grizzly hair, and illustrated it so. Had not that impression 
about the cobra been corrected by subsequent travellers in the Hast, 
Huropeans would still have believed that the Cobra-de-Capello was 
a cobra-bear. 
In order, then, to ascertain the existence of the Bis-cobra, we 
must go back to the period of time at which, so far as we can dis- 
cover, the term came into use in India, and find out its origin, and 
the reasons which led to its application to the animal, which was 
given that name, bearing in mind particularly that the term must 
have been applied to some animal having something to do with the 
Cobra. It is by means of this method of enquiry that I intend 
shortly to examine the origin of the belief that such an animal as 
the Bis-cobra existed. ‘ 
First as to the origin of the term. The term Bis-cobra is not of 
Oriental origin. It is simply a Portuguese expression, which seems 
to have undergone contraction long since by a process, similar to 
that which the native servants, jugglers, and vendors use now-a-days 
to contort English phrases. 
The term Bis-cobra is Bicho-de-Cobra. contracted. 
The word Cobra being, in Portuguese, the equivalent of coluber 
and angwis in Latin, the earlier Portuguese in India, with whom the 
use of the word must have commenced, applied it to all sorts of 
snakes, and some lizards and worms, but their acquaintance with 
Natural History being very limited, they naturally classified the 
