pre-anal scale. The very minuteness of this character makes it valuable:
its value was doubtless unheeded by the artist, who merely drew what he
saw; it is, however, a very decisive mark of distinction between a
serpent and a fish.

Seba records that he had received these Serpents from the Island of St
Domingo. This was at that time a flourishing French colony, and its
natural productions were far better known to Europe than they now are.
When I visited the neighbouring island of Jamaica in 1845-46, I heard
accounts of a wonderful animal occasionally seen in the eastern
districts of the island, which was reported as a Snake with a cock's
comb and wattles, and which crowed like a cock. A good deal of mystery
attached to this strange Serpent.

It was appropriated to a very remarkable and peculiar character of
scenery:--A wild mountain-region, formed of white limestone, abounding
in narrow glens, bounded by abrupt precipices, and permeated by
whispering streams that frequently pour in slender cascades over the
rocks. The limestone rock rises in abrupt terraces, wall above wall, and
its entire surface is most singularly honeycombed, "as if wrought by a
graving tool into rough diamond-points," alternating with smooth and
rounded holes of various sizes, from that of a hazel-nut upward. In many
of these hollows lie the small land-shells of the country, bleached
perfectly white, like the stone itself, of the genera _Helix_,
_Cyclostoma_, _Helicina_, _Cylindrella_, _Achatina_, &c., many of them
perfect, but many more in fragments. They exactly resemble fossil shells
_in situ_, but the species are absolutely identical with those that
crawl over the shrubs and trees in the same region. In very many cases
the dead shells accurately fit the hollows in the rock, whose interior
is impressed with the form and sculpturing of the shell in
_intaglio_:--a most curious and interesting fact, as it points to the
very recent formation of the region, the stone bearing evident tokens of
having been in a plastic condition when the shells were enveloped in it.
Out of the hollows of the rock, their roots fast grasping the
sharp-edged projections and tooth-like points of stone, and twining
through the tortuous cavities, and insinuating their fibrils into every
minute hollow where water may lodge, grow many tall trees of various
kinds, interlaced with climbers, and hung with festoons of _lianes_,
that resemble long and twisted cords, thrown from on