Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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I Say Perhaps,
For Great Naturalists Appear To Admit That All The Pythons Belong To
The Old, And All The Boas To The New World.
As the boa of Pliny was a
serpent of Africa and of the south of Europe, it would have been well
if the boas of America had been named pythons, and the pythons of
India been called boas.
The first notions of an enormous reptile
capable of seizing man, and even the great quadrupeds, came to us from
India and the coast of Guinea. However indifferent names may be, we
can scarcely admit the idea, that the hemisphere in which Virgil
described the agonies of Laocoon (a fable which the Greeks of Asia
borrowed from much more southern nations) does not possess the
boa-constrictor. I will not augment the confusion of zoological
nomenclature by proposing new changes, and shall confine myself to
observing that at least the missionaries and the latinized Indians of
the missions, if not the planters of Guiana, clearly distinguish the
traga-venados (real boas, with simple anal plates) from the culebras
de agua, or water-snakes, like the camudu (pythons with double anal
scales). The traga-venados have no transverse bands on the back, but a
chain of rhombic or hexagonal spots. Some species prefer the driest
places; others love the water, as the pythons, or culebras de agua.
Advancing towards the west, we find the hills or islets in the
deserted branch of the Orinoco crowned with the same palm-trees that
rise on the rocks of the cataracts.
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