298 



REPTILES. 



[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 



dosd, 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, Brahmans 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 



