in fact occupied all day long in gathering mussels, sea-urchins, and pandanus nuts, and cracking the latter. The supremacy of the stronger sex was asserted with the utmost severity, and nowhere did the tyranny of man show itself in a more contemptible light. Once a poor woman, fancying herself unobserved, ventured to eat a few kernels of the nuts she had fetched from a great distance, but unfortunately did not escape the vigilant eye of her brutal husband, who immediately rose and knocked her down. Thus overworked and debased by ill-treatment, we cannot wonder if the females possess none of those qualities and graces which render women in Europe so charming. Truly, even in the wildest regions of the earth, it would be difficult to find a spot still less adapted to the moral and intellectual improvement of its inhabitants than a coral island, despite its cloudless sky, its waving palm trees, its azure lagoon, and the magnificence of the sea hurling its snow-white breakers against the reef. [Illustration: THE UROPELTIS PHILIPPINUS.] CHAPTER XXIII. SNAKES. First Impression of a Tropical Forest--Exaggerated Fears-- Comparative rareness of Venomous Snakes--Their Habits and External Characters--Anecdote of the Prince of Neu Wied--The Bite of the Trigonocephalus--Antidotes--Fangs of the Venomous Snakes described--The Bush-master--The Echidna Ocellata-- The Rattlesnakes--Extirpated by Hogs--The Cobra de Capello-- Indian Snake-Charmers--Maritime Excursions of the Cobra--The Egyptian Haje--The Cerastes--Boas and Pythons--The Jiboya--The Anaconda--Enemies of the Serpents--The Secretary--The Adjutant-- The Mongoos--A Serpent swallowed by another--The Locomotion of Serpents--Anatomy of their Jaws--Serpents feeding in the Zoological Gardens--Domestication of the Rat-Snake--Water-Snakes. On penetrating for the first time into a tropical forest, the traveller is moved by many conflicting emotions. This luxuriance of vegetation revelling in ever-changing forms, these giants of the woods clasped by the python-folds of enormous creepers, and bearing whole hosts of parasites on their knotty arms; this strange and unknown world of plants, harbouring in its impenetrable recesses a no less strange and unknown world of animals, all unite in filling the soul with pleasurable excitement; and yet the heart is, at the same time, chilled with vague fears, that mix like a discordant sound with the harmonies of this sylvan world. For in the hollows of the tangled roots and in the dense underwood of the forest a brood of noxious reptiles loves to conceal itself, and who knows whether a snake, armed with poisonous fangs, may not dart forth from the rustling foliage.