Chap. IX.] THE GKEEN 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 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 eluding, 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 Gunther on The Geog. Distribution 



the continent of India by the in- of Reptiles, Magaz. Nat. Hist, for 



terposition of the sea, a list of March, 1859, p. 230. 

 reptiles will be found at p. 319, in- 



T 2 



