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all present, to meet with another. Every one in the party, except myself, has some curious experience to relate. I hear for the first time about the alleged inability of the trigonocephalus to wound except at a distance from his enemy of not less than one-third of his length ;— about M. A , a former director of the Jardin des Plantes, who used to boldly thrust his arm into holes where he knew snakes were, and pull them o u t , — catching them just behind the head and wrapping the tail round his arm,— and place them alive in a cage without ever getting b i t t e n ; — a b o u t M. B , who, while hunting one day, tripped in the coils of an immense trigonocephalus, and ran so fast in his fright that the serpent, entangled round his leg, could not bite him ;—about M. C , who could catch a fer-de-lance by the tail, and " crack it like a whip " until the head would fly off ;—about an old white man living in the Champ-Flore, whose diet was snake-meat, and who always kept in his ajoupa " a keg of salted serpents " (yon ka sepent-sale) ;—about a monster eight feet long which killed, near Morne Rouge, M. Charles Fabre's white cat, but was also killed by the cat after she had been caught in the folds of the reptile ;—about the value of snakes as protectors of the sugar-cane and cocoa-shrub against rats ;—about an unsuccessful effort made, during a plague of rats in Guadeloupe, to introduce the f e r - d e - l a n c e there ;—about the alleged power of a monstrous toad, the crapaud-ladre, to cause the death of the snake that swallows it ;—and, finally, about the total absence of the idyllic and pastoral elements in Martinique literature, as due to the presence of reptiles everywhere. " Even the flora and fauna of the country remain to a large extent unknown,"—adds the last speaker, an amiable old physician of St. Pierre,—"because the existence of the ferde-lance renders all serious research dangerous in the extreme."