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The Dragon: Quedah

Captain Sherard Osborn, in his description of Quedah in * Broderip, Leaves from the Note Book of a Naturalist, p. 357. + Australasia, p. 273. ‡ Quedah; London, 1857. the Malay peninsula, says, also, as a matter of popular belief: "The natives of Tamelan declared most of them to be of the boa-constrictor (species, but spoke of monsters in the deep forests, which might, if they came out, clear off the whole village. A pleasant feat, for which Jadie, with a wag of his sagacious head, assured me that an 'oular Bessar' or big snake was quite competent. "It was strange but interesting to find amongst all Malays a strong belief in the extraordinary size to which the boaconstrictors or pythons would grow; they all maintained that in the secluded forests of Sumatra or Borneo, as well as on some of the smaller islands which were not inhabited, these snakes were occasionally found of forty or fifty feet in length."

Major McNair says* : "One of the keenest sportsmen in Singapore gives an account of a monster that he encountered. He had wounded a boar in the jungle, and was following its tracks with his dogs, when, in penetrating further into the forest, he found the dogs at bay, and, advancing cautiously, prepared for another shot at the boar; to his surprise, however, he found that the dogs were baying a huge python, which had seized the boar, thrown its coils round the unfortunate beast, and was crushing it to death. A well-directed shot laid the reptile writhing on the ground, and it proved to be about thirty feet long. But such instances of extreme length are rare."