disappeared among the fragmentary rocks.

The son of this gentleman met with another specimen under the following
circumstances, as detailed to me by my friend:--"It was, I think, on
Easter Eve, the 30th of March last, [1850,] that some youngsters of the
town came running to tell me of a curious snake, unlike any snake they
had ever seen before, which young Cargill had shot, when out for a day's
sport among the woodlands of a neighbouring penn. They described it as
in all respects a serpent, but with a very curious shaped head, and with
wattles on each side of its jaws. After taking it in hand and looking at
it, they placed it in a hollow tree, intending to return for it when
they should be coming home, but they had strolled from the place so far
that it was inconvenient to retrace their steps when wearied with
rambling; but they had lost no time in relating the adventure to me,
knowing it would interest me much, particularly as young Cargill's
father had thought it a snake similar to the one he had seen at Skibo,
in St George's, or to the crested serpent for a specimen of which, when
in St Thomas's in the East, he had offered the sum of twenty shillings.
The youth that shot the snake fell ill on the following morning with
fever, and could not go back to the woodlands to seek it, but he sent
his younger brother who had been with him; but although he thought he
rediscovered the tree in which his brother had placed it, he could not
find the snake. He conjectured that the rats had devoured it in the
night. When this adventure was related to me, another youth, Ulick
Ramsay, a godson of mine, who came 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-serjeant at the barracks in Spanish Town,
a curious snake, which he, too, had shot among the rocks of a little
line of eminences 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 honeycombed rocks that protrude through the plain of
St Catherine'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, leaving masses