298 
EEPTILES. 
[Chap. IX. 
Cobra de Capello. — The cobra de capello is the only 
one exhibited by the itinerant snake-charmers : and 
the truth of Davy's conjecture, that they control it, 
not by extracting its fangs, but by courageously avail- 
ing themselves of its well-known timidity and extreme 
reluctance to use its fatal weapons, received a painful 
confirmation during my residence in Ceylon, by the 
death of one of these performers, whom his audience 
had provoked to attempt some unaccustomed familiarity 
with the cobra ; it bit him on the wrist, and he expired 
the same evening. The hill near Kandy, on which the 
official residences of the Governor and Colonial Secretary 
are built, is covered in many places with the deserted 
nests of the white ants (termites), and these are the 
favourite retreats of the sluggish and spiritless cobra, 
which watches from their apertures the toads and 
lizards on which it preys. Here, when I have re- 
peatedly come upon them, their only impulse was 
concealment; and on one occasion, when a cobra of 
considerable length could not escape, owing to the 
bank being nearly precipitous on both sides of the road, 
a few blows from my whip were sufficient to deprive it 
of life. 1 
A gentleman who held a civil appointment at 
Kornegalle, had a servant who was bitten by a snake ; 
1 A Singhalese work, the Sarpa- correctly, in the Ceylon Times for 
dosa, enumerates four castes of the January, 1857. It is more than 
cobra; — the raja, or king; the probable, as the division repre- 
bamunu, or Brahman ; the velanda, sents the four castes of the Hindus, 
or trader ; and the gori, or agricul- Chastriyas, Brahman s Vaisyas, and 
turist. Of these the raja, or "king Sudras ; that the insertion of the 
of the cobras," is said to have the gori instead of the latter was a 
head and the anterior half of the pious fraud of some copyist to 
body of so light a colour, that at a confer rank upon the Vellales, the 
distance it seems like a silvery agricultural caste of Ceylon, 
white. The work is quoted, but not 
