Cuar. IX.] THE GREEN CALOTES. 275 
was then under investigation. Before commencing the 
operation of preparing the poison, a cock has to be 
sacrificed to the yakhos or demons. 
This ugly lizard is itself regarded with such aversion 
by the Singhalese, that if a kabara enter a house or 
walk over the roof, it is regarded as an omen of ill fortune, 
sickness, or death ; and in order to avert the evil, a priest 
is employed to go through a rhythmical incantation ; one 
portion of which consists in the repetition of the words 
Kabara goyin wan dosey 
Ada palayan e désey. * 
“ These are the inflictions caused by the Kabara-goya 
— let them now be averted!” 
It is one of the incidents that serve to indicate that 
Ceylon may belong to a separate circle of physical geo- 
graphy, that this lizard, though found to the eastward 
in Burmah!, has not hitherto been discovered in the 
Dekkan or Hindustan, 
Blood-suckers.—The lizards already mentioned, how- 
ever, are but the stranger’s introduction to innumerable 
varieties of others, all most attractive in their sudden 
movements, and some unsurpassed in the brilliancy of 
their colouring, which bask on banks, dart over rocks, 
and peer curiously out of the chinks of every ruined wall. 
In all their motions there is that vivid and brief energy, 
the rapid but restrained action associated with their 
1 In corroboration of the view 
propounded elsewhere (see pp. 7, 
84, &c.), and opposed to the 
popular belief that Ceylon, at some 
remote period, was detached from 
the continent of India by the in- 
terposition of the sea, a list of 
reptiles will be found at p. 319, in- 
cluding, not only individual species, 
but whole genera peculiar to the 
island, and not to be found on the 
mainland. See a paper by Dr. A. 
Ginruer on The Geog. Distribution 
of Reptiles, Magaz. Nat. Hist. for 
March, 1859, p. 230. 
T2 
