PRODIGIOUS SIZE OF THE BOA. 
45 
we are shocked to add that there is an instance upon 
record of a human being who fell a sacrifice to one of 
these monsters. A man belonging to a Malay prow, 
which had anchored for the night close to the Island 
of Celebes, went on shore to look for betel nut, and 
on his return is supposed to have gone to sleep upon 
the beach. In the middle of the night his screams 
were heard by the people in the vessel, who imme- 
diately went on shore ; but, alas ! they came too 
late, their comrade was crushed to death by a mon- 
strous snake ; and all the satisfaction they could 
derive was to revenge his death by killing his enemy, 
whose head they cut off, and carried, together with 
the body of the man, on board their boat. The 
marks of the fangs were imprinted upon the man’s 
right wrist; and the corpse, though disfigured, bore 
evident signs of having been crushed by the monster’s 
twisting himself round the head, neck, breast, and 
thigh. The snake measured about thirty feet ; and 
when the jaws were extended they admitted a body 
the size of a man’s head.”* 
Mr. Wood has evidently written with great caution 
upon this subject, as if distrusting the accounts given 
by travellers of the extraordinary size of the boa ; 
but there is no reason to doubt that this reptile very 
much exceeds the length given to it by modern 
naturalists. It is universally admitted that the boa 
is the largest of all the serpent tribe ; and the large 
pimbereh, a snake, I believe, peculiar to the fenny 
tracts of Ceylon, which is not a boa, has been occa- 
sionally found to measure upwards of thirty feet; 
* Wood’s Zoography, vol. ii. 
