96 COPHIAS l.ANCEOLATUS. 



yellow, others grey, and others variegated with yellow, grey, and 

 brown ; they are extremely active, ready to bite, and six or eight 

 inches in length. 



Fortunately for mankind, the habitat of this animal 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 chanceequally 

 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 intro- 

 duced into Martinique by the Arronages, a horde which inhabited 

 near the Orinoco, and who, impelled by sentiments of hatred and 

 vengeance against the Caribs 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, (Cophias lan- 

 ceolatus) is aboriginal to Martinico, it 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 mul- 

 tiplied, at the present day, in St. Lucia and Martinique, 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 the rushing streams, 

 which would hurry them to the sea, and balancing themselves on 

 the branches of forest trees, more than one hundred feet above the 

 ground. On the edge of the crater of the naked mountain which 

 overhangs the town of St. Pierre, in Martinique, at a height of 

 more than five thousand feet, M. Moreau de Jonnes, and his com- 

 panions encountered a Trigonocephalus, the more to be feared as 

 an excessive lassitude, the consequence of their arduous exertions, 



