NEST or BOA. 
321 
nent, and protected only by a soft skin ; the eyes 
enormous, black, ill-defined; the scutation pretty 
well marked. It was of a pale flesh colour, but 
pellucid. One foetus which I took out writhed. 
At the mouth of the hole, the lad informed me, 
lay a heap of earth, excavated in forming the bur- 
row. But how was it brought out ? The boy sug- 
gested, ‘‘with its mouth.” The chamber was well 
lined with trash, the soft strips of half-dried plantain 
leaves ; these, I suppose, must have been carried in 
in its mouth. 
On my communicating this circumstance to my 
friend Mr. Hill, he favoured me with the following 
note : “ I should conclude that the Yellow Snake 
excavates the hole in which it deposits its eggs by 
loosening the earth with its head, and delivering, at 
the entrance, the crumbled dirt by the muscular 
movements of the trunk ; the vertebrae and the ribs 
doing that for the transference of the detached earth 
from the snout to the tail, which they unitedly per- 
form for the movement of the body forward in pro- 
gression. The mechanical power is not that of the 
Archimedean screw, because the motion is not spiral ; 
but it is a similar movement, alternating right and 
left, and left and right upon a plane ; and it equally 
urges onward anything for delivery along the whole 
extent of the moving body within the perforated 
hole. The coil of the body at the extremity of this 
excavation would form the terminating chamber, 
where, in the midst of a bed of trash, it deposits its 
eggs. The spurs of the fig and the buttresses of the 
cotton-tree are favourite dormitories of the Yellow 
