Chap. 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 closey 
Ada palayan e dosey. 
" 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 1 , 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 chiding, not only individual species, 
propounded elsewhere (see pp. 7, but whole genera peculiar to the 
84, &c), and opposed to the island, and not to be found on the 
popular belief that Ceylon, at some mainland. See a paper by Dr. A. 
remote period, was detached from Gunthek on The Geog. Distribution 
the continent of India by the in- of Eeptiles, Magaz. Fat. Hist, for 
terposition of the sea, a list of March, 1859, p. 230. 
reptiles will be found at p. 319, in- 
T 2 
