the barracks, close to which the deceased had lived, interfered in the matter. They put a guard of one or two men on the house, declaring that they would allow the body to remain unburied for seven days, but would not permit any trickery. Of course the poor serpent-charmer never came to life again. His death, and the manner of it, gave a severe blow, as has been already hinted, to the art and practice of snake-charming in Madras. Roberts also mentions the instance of a man who came to a gentleman's house to exhibit tame snakes, and on being told that a Cobra, or Hooded Snake was in a cage in the house, was asked if he could charm it; on his replying in the affirmative, the Serpent was released from the cage, and, no doubt, in a state of high irritation. The man began his incantations, and repeated his charms, but the Snake darted at him, fastened upon his arm, and before night he was a corpse. These failures, rare and abnormal as they confessedly are, do not by any means disprove the reality of snake-charming; they certainly shew that the men believe in their own powers. It may be, as some Europeans have maintained, that in India, the exhibitors usually practise upon tame snakes, from which they have already extracted the fangs, or even eradicated the poison sacs,--an operation performed without difficulty by making an incision beneath and behind each eye. Or it may be that the power of music over these reptiles is ordinarily relied on, and that in rare instances this fails. I have myself taken fierce and active lizards, in Jamaica, by a noose of string, while whistling a lively tune. As soon as the whistling commenced, the lizard would become still on the trunk or the branch of a tree, and so remain unmoved, with a sleepy look all the while I was searching up the string, preparing the noose, and presenting it to him, giving just a backward glance of his eye, as the noose slipped over his head, the whistling going on vigorously all the time, of course, till the cord being jerked tight, he suddenly found himself dangling in the air at the end of a stick, and began to wriggle and writhe, and scratch and bite furiously. One thing seems clear from these accidents. The Indian _samp-wallahs_ do not use any infusion or unguent to stupefy and disarm their snakes, as do those of Ethiopia. If these men just mentioned had been so protected they would not have been killed, however rash or pot-valiant they might have been. Indeed the accounts of Bruce and others of the African professors of the psyllic art, and the phenomena of the serpents acted upon, differ greatly from descriptions of parallel exhibitions in India, and suggest diverse modes of explanation.