ver, accompanied with
twitchings of the extremities; then tetanus ensued, followed by death in
forty-eight hours.

Although these sea snakes are common to all tropical seas, they are most
frequent about the Great Barrier Reef of Australia. On any smooth
day they may be seen disporting themselves on the surface, or rising
suddenly from the depths, erect their heads and some inches of their
bodies clear from the water, gaze at the passing vessel, and then
swiftly disappear. In nearly all the Pacific Islands the natives hold
them in detestation and horror, and when one is seen lying coiled up on
a rock sunning itself or crawling over the surface of the reef in search
of food, a stone, accompanied by a curse, is always hurled at it. In the
Ellice Oroup, when catching flying-fish at night, one (or more) of these
horrid serpents is sometimes swept up in the scoop-net before it can be
avoided. They range from six inches to nearly four feet in length, and
all have one feature--a blunted tail-end.

Quite recently much further light has been thrown on the subject by Sir
James Hector, of the Philosophical Society of Wellington, New Zealand.
At one of the Society's meetings, held in April last, Sir James showed
several specimens of _hydrida_, some from Australasian Seas, others
from the Atlantic. The usual habitat of sea snakes, he said, were the
tropical seas generally, but some had been captured in the comparatively
cold waters of the New Zealand coast, at the Catlins River. These latter
were all yellow-banded; those from the islands of the Fijian Oroup were
black-banded, and those taken from the Australian coast grey-banded.
There were, he said, no fewer than seventy species, which, without
exception, were fanged and provided with glands secreting a virulent
poison. In some of the mountainous islands of the South Pacific, such as
Samoa, Fiji, &c, there were several species of land snakes, all of which
were perfectly harmless, and were familiar to many people in Australia
and New Zealand, through being brought there in bunches of island
bananas--it was singular, he thought, that the sea snakes alone should
be so highly venomous. "They were all characterised by the flattened
or blunted tail, which they used as a steer oar, and were often found
asleep on the surface of the water, lying on their backs. In this state
they were easily and safely captured, being powerless to strike." The
present writer, who has seen hundreds of these