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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[NOVEMBER, 1903.
facing each other, with a fourth suspended over them, and as they get heated they throw their poison into a pot placed to receive it. A lizard (hand) can tell the future, and so the direction of its chirp is observed: from the east, it denotes pleasant news; south, sickness or death; north, profit; and west, the arrival of a friend; and if this little saurian or the deadly skink (hikanald) falls on the right side of a person, he will gain riches; on the left, great evil will ensue. The blood-sucker (katussa) means by the upward motion of its head that girls be unearthed, and by the downward that boys, its inveterate enemies, be buried. The chameleon (yak-katused) is the incarnation of women who have died in parturition. Marine turtles (kesbéró) are held sacred and not killed. The ery of frogs (gembó) is a sign that rain is impending; their urine is poisonous; if a frog that infests a house be removed to any great distance it will come back- a mark may be made on it to test the truth; a person is made lean by the Polypedactus maculatus (gos gemadiya or etagembá) jumping on him.
A python (pimbura) swallows a whole deer and then goes between the trunks of two trees growing near each other to crush the bones of its prey. Cobras (nayi) are held sacred and never killed; some have the wishing gem (naga manikkaya) in their throats which they keep out to entice insects, and if this be taken from them they kill themselves; they frequent sandal-wood trees, are fond of the sweet-smelling flowers of the wild pine, and are attracted by music: their bite is fatal on Sundays, and to keep them off, the snake-charmers carry the root of the Martynia diandra (ndgadarana). Of the seven varieties of Ceylon vipers (polangu), the bite of the nidi polangd causes a deep sleep and that of the le polanga discharges of blood; the female viper expires when its, skin is distended with offspring and the young make their escape out of the decomposed body. The green whip-snake (hetulla) attacks the eyes of those who approach it, and the shadow of the brown whip-snake (henakandaya) makes one lame and paralytic; a rat-snake (gerandiya) seldom bites, but if it does, it is fatal to trample cow-dung. The Tropidonotus stolichus (aharakukka) lives in groups of seven, and when one is killed the others come in search of it; and the Dipsas forstenii (mapila) reaches its victim on the floor by several of them linking together and hanging from the roof. The legendary kobo snake loses a joint of its tail every time it expends its poison, till one is left, when it gets wings and a head like that of a toad; with the last bite the victim and itself both die. A snake-doctor generally finds out what kind of reptile had bitten a person by a queer method: if the informer touches his breast with the right hand, it is a viper; if the head, a mapila; if the stomach, a frog; if the right shoulder with the left hand, a Bungarus cæruleus (karawald); if he be excited, it is a skink; and if the messenger be a weeping female carrying a child, it is a cobra.
Worms (panuvo) attack flowers in November, and are subject to charms; retribution follows on one ruthlessly destroying the clay nest of a mason-wasp (kumbald); winged termites (meru), which issue in swarms in the rainy season, prognosticate a good supply of fish; spiders (makund) are former fishermen who are continning their old vocation; snails (golubell) used to spit at others, and the Mantis religiosa (darakettiyd) was guilty of robbing firewood; bugs infest a house when misfortune is impending; leeches (kúdelló) are engaged in measuring the ground, and crickets (reheyyó) stridulate till they burst. It is lucky to have ants carrying their eggs about a house, but if middlesized black ants (geri) do so, the head of the house will die within a short interval; when a person is in a bad temper, it is sarcastically said that a red ant (dimiyd) has broken wind on him; the kanwéyd, a small red myriapod, causes death by entering the ear. Every new-born child has a louse on its head, which is never killed, but thrown away or put on to another's head. As the finger is taken round a bimúrd, a burrowing insect, it dances to the couplet "Bim úra, bim úra; tôt natapiya mat natannan" (bimûrd bimûrd, you better dance and I too shall do so).
The presence of fire-flies (kandmediriyd) in a house indicate that it will be broken into or deserted; if they alight on a person, a private loss will ensue, and whatever be wished for, as they are picked up, will be obtained; they had formerly refused to give a light to one in wout of it; their bite requires "the mud of the sea and the stars of the sky" to effect a cure an occult way of expressing salt and the gum of the eye. Butterflies (samanalayo) go on a pilgrimage from November
