CRESTED SNAKE. 
383 
with the young Cargills to tell me of their discovery, 
informed me, that not long previously he had seen 
in the hand of the barrack-master sergeant, at the 
barracks in Spanish Town, a curious snake which he 
too had shot among the rocks of a little line of emi- 
nences near the railway, about two miles out, called 
Craigallechie. It was a serpent with a curious- 
shaped head, and projections on each side which he 
likened to the fins of an eel, but said they were close 
up to the jaws. Here are unquestionably two of 
the same snakes with those of Seba’s Thesaurus, taken 
near Spanish Town, and both about the honeycomb 
rocks that protrude through the plain of St. Cathe- 
rine’s in detached ridges, and cones, and hummocks, 
being points of the greater lines of limestone, which 
have been covered by the detritus of the plains, leav- 
ing masses of the under rocks here and there un- 
covered. These are the spots frequented too by the 
Cyclura ; and are continuations of our Red Hills, — 
a country that so much resembles the terraced cliffs 
and red-soil glens of Higuey. 
“ Must we not take the horny coverings of the 
mouth of this Snake, which so much resemble the bill 
of a bird, as an affinity of the serpent with the tor- 
toise, and the cutaneous appendages as indicating 
some relation to the Mata-mata, or CJielys Jimhriata 
of Spix ? It will be not much of a guess to suppose, 
that, like the Mata-mata, it conceals all but its head, 
and leaving that out, waits in ambush for young birds, 
and seizes them as they approach. I cannot con- 
sider the habits of this serpent fluviatile at all ; for 
the gular appendage is no fin.” 
^^Jan. 1851. — I showed young Cargill your 
