Miscellanea. 
299 
keelless scales, and the broad band-like ventral shields of the 
vermiform terrestrial snakes ( Elaphina ). In this respect it agrees 
with the genus Aipisurus, but it is at once distinguished from that 
genus by the ventral shields being broader in proportion and 
acutely keeled along the middle line, and by having the head- 
shields of Hydrus; in fact it is exactly intermediate between the 
genus Hydrus of Hydrida and Aipisurus of Elapldna in Colubridee 
It may be called Hypotropis. 
Scales large, smooth, six-sided ; head short, truncated in front; 
nasal large, with the lunate nostrils in the middle of their hinder 
part; crown shields small, superciliary numerous, labial shield 
high, loreal none; throat scaley; ventral shields broad, band¬ 
like, folded together and keeled in the middle, notched behind at 
the keel; tail compressed, covered with large broad six-sided 
smooth scales. 
Hypotropis Jukesii. Olive, yellowish below. 
Hab. Sea, near Darnley Islands. “ Merad sand-bank, while 
at anchor, May 1845.” 
Smelting by Electricity. —The lately patented process of 
smelting copper by means of electricity, says the Morning 
Herald , is likely to effect a change that will be quite prodigious. 
It produces in less than two days what the old process required 
three weeks to effect. And the saving of fuel is so vast, that in 
Swansea alone the smelters estimate their annual saving in coals 
at no less than five hundred thousand pounds. Hence it is clear 
that the price of copper must be so enormously reduced, as to 
bring it into use for a variety of purposes from which its cost at 
present excludes it. The facility and cheapness of the process, 
too, will enable the ore to be largely smelted on the spot. The 
Cornish mine proprietors are anxiously expecting the moment 
when they can bring the ore which lay in the mine yesterday into 
a state to be sent to market to-morrow; and this at the very 
mouth of the mine. In Australia, also, the operation of this 
discovery will be of the utmost importance. Ten thousand tons 
of copper ore were sent from Australia to England last year, to 
be smelted at Swansea; and the result was only 1,600 tons of 
u 2 
