of science, or common sense, if he will but exercise it, to see it done in order to believe it; but when ocular testimony is added, it sets the question at rest beyond all doubt. The next thing to be considered is the anatomy of the snake immediately after the birth of her progeny; but that could not be so easily ascertained as that she swallows them.* W CHARLES WATERTON AS A NATURALIST.† I. HAT Charles Waterton said of Humboldt in regard to ornithology applied well to himself in the matter of snakes and other animals. At page 251, Warne, 1871, he wrote:-“As for Humboldt, I cannot think of submitting to his *The following short articles appeared in Land and Water, on the days respectively mentioned: "THE VIPER AND ITS YOUNG.-A few days ago, says the Ulverston Mirror, Mr. Edward Swainson, Nibthwaite, met with a viper on the eastern side of Conis. ton Lake, and killed it. Then, observing it to be of unusual thickness about the middle, he put his foot upon the place, thinking that the reptile had recently swallowed a mouse. The pressure brought out ten young vipers from the mouth of the old one. Some of them were about five inches long, and some shorter; but all were alive and active, as if they had previously seen the light of day, and had again sought shelter in the parent."-September 27th, 1873. "VIPERS SWALLOWING THEIR YOUNG. -Sir: I observed in your paper of last week-I have not a copy by me, and do not remember the signature-the statement of a correspondent, that having killed a female viper, he placed his foot upon her, and that forthwith out of her mouth issued a stream of viperlings. If they came out of the mouth, they must have previously entered it. I wish to ask Mr. Frank Buckland, and I beg for a categorical answer, whether he believe this story or not? If he do, he must recant his often expressed conviction, that the fact is incredible and impossible. If not, he must be prepared to show that your correspondent, intentionally otherwise, has stated what is not true.G. R. or "[I perfectly believe the young vipers testímony in matters of ornithology for one single moment. The avocations of this traveller were of too multiplied a nature to enable him to be a correct practical ornithologist." And he illustrated what White of Selborne said about naturalists generally :-" Men that undertake were pressed out of the mouth of the mother viper when our correspondent put his foot upon it; but it certainly does not follow that these young vipers had been previously swallowed by the mother; they had never been born. When the foot was placed upon the mother viper they were squeezed out of her mouth.— F. BUCKLAND.]"-October 4th. "VIPERS SWALLOWING THEIR YOUNG. -Sir: In your last impression I begged for an explicit answer from Mr. Buckland, Whether or not he believed the statement made by a correspondent that, having killed a female viper and placed his foot upon her, out of her mouth issued a stream of viperlings?' To this he replies that, 'The young vipers were pressed out of the mouth of the mother when your correspondent put his foot upon it.' This is not exactly the categorical answer I expected, but I must now ask Mr. Buckland to reconcile this explanation with his statement, repeated in two or three numbers of your paper last year, that the unborn vipers were proved on dissection to be located not in the stomach-with which, of course, the mouth communicates-but in the abdomi nal parietes, a portion of the creature entirely distinct and unconnected with it! It appears to me self-evident that the young vipers, if they came out of the mouth, must have gone in at the mouth. They could not otherwise have reached that orifice. The question, there. fore, again resolves itself into one of credibility.-G. R.”—October 11th. Dated August 16th, 1873. only one district are much more likely to advance natural knowledge than those that grasp at more than they can possibly be acquainted with" (Edition 1833, page 128). What his biographer and editor, Mr. Moore, says of him is very far from the truth, however it might be in regard to birds. "He rarely ventured upon a statement which he had not abundantly verified, and his adversaries were careless observers or book-worms" (p. 129). "In all his pryings into animal ways his accuracy was extreme. To this hour he has not been convicted of a single error" (p. 134). Waterton says:"Our own snakes here in England are scarcely worth notice so far as their venom is concerned. One species, which I designate under the name of adder, is a harmless little fellow. . Our other snake is the well-known viper, armed with two small poison-fangs" (p. 432). To show that these designations are not a slip of the pen, he adds, at page 435 "We have no vipers in this neighbourhood, but adders are plentiful within the park-wall, where I encourage and protect them." This seems odd, when all admit that adders and vipers are the same serpents. He had more reason than he imagined for writing as follows -"In taking a retrospective view of what I have written on the nature and habits of snakes, as it differs widely from the accounts which we have already received, I really hesitate to lay these notes before the public" (p. 437). And he might have "hesitated before publishing the following:-" If they can show that I have deviated from the line of truth in one single solitary instance, I will consent to be called an impostor; and then may the Wanderings be trodden under foot, and be forgotten forever" (p. 58). I would not think of taking him at his word, either in regard to his Wanderings or Essays, for a person may prove very erroneous in his | estimate of what he believes to be truth, and very hasty and presumptuous in putting forth for truth that which has no foundation in fact. He informs us that the “common and accepted notion that snakes can fascinate animals to their destruction, by a dead-set of the eye at them, is erroneous, and ought to be exploded. Snakes in fact have no such power" (p. 431). He repeats the idea on another occasion :"The supposed horridly fascinating power said to be possessed by the serpent, through the medium of the eye, has no foundation in truth" (p. 465). He admits that this is a common and accepted notion." Now, if anything is generally believed of snakes in the United States, it is that of charming, fascinating, magnetising or paralysing animals, and particularly birds, by whatever means it is done. I gave, in Land and Water, on the 3d of May last, the testimony of two highly intelligent and credible people on the subject. I find the following in a work, published in Philadelphia and London, in 1823, titled Manners and Customs of Several Indian Tribes, by John Dunn Hunter. This man was carried off by the Indians when very young, and left them when a young man, in consequence of having betrayed their intended treachery to the Whites. Being naturally of excellent parts, he was easily educated, and, being greatly befriended by his own race, published his memoirs, which show truth on the face of every page of them. Of the rattlesnake he says:- Whenever it fixes its piercing eyes on a bird, squirrel, etc., it commences and keeps up an incessant rattling noise until the animal, convulsed by fear, approaches within the reach of its formidable enemy, and sometimes into its very jaws. This, however, is not always the result, for I have repeatedly seen animals thus agitated, and in imminent danger, 66 says: The make their escape without any inter- Again, Waterton vention in their favour except the cast-off slough always appears inside recovery of their own powers (p. out" (p. 432). It would be inter179). The latter half of this ac- esting to know how he learned that count is not very clear; perhaps as a fact in regard to all snakes; or the appearance of a third party, if he could explain how a snake under certain circumstances, broke could come out of its skin, turning the spell. If we turn to Waterton's it "inside out," leaving the scales Life, page 51, we will find what was that covered its eyes in the most apparently an exact counterpart of perfect and beautiful condition, and this scene in an early stage of it; the whole skin stretched out, also that he had witnessed part of the most as natural as when the snake horridly fascinating power" with- was inside of it.* Again, he says: out being aware of it. In Gosse's In Gosse's "Properly speaking, all snakes Naturalist's Sojourn in Jamaica, are boa-constrictors" (p. 434). I 1871, we have the following:- would ask again, how did he learn (6 Sam has seen a boa ascend a that? Did he see every kind of mango-tree, on one of whose snake catch and swallow its prey, to branches a fowl was perching, and know whether it was a constrictor or when at some distance from the not? When I met a garter snake prey, begin to dart out and vibrate with a frog pretty well down its its tongue, its eyes fixed on the fowl, throat, feet foremost, and appearing while it slowly and uniformly drew at perfect ease, and killed it, so that near; the poor hen all the time in- the frog hopped away, like any tently watching the foe, but without other frog, I could certainly say stirring or crying. Help came that that snake was not a constrictfortuitously, just as the snake was or in any sense of the word; for a about to strike, and the fowl was constrictor crushes its prey in alrescued. How strange it is that in most a moment of time, and then widely remote parts of the world swallows it. W. Gordon Cumming we should hear the same state- says that he made a daman, a ments. Sam has never read what species of water-snake, seven or other observers have described eight feet long, in India, disgorge a about fascination, but he and others frog which was all swallowed but affirm, from their own observation, the head, when the frog disappearthat some such power is exercised ed among the weeds. That is (p. 317). Waterton denied this a very common Occurrence in power or peculiarity in snakes, al- America. Waterton says that the though he was apparently within a boa-constrictor "swallows the torhair-breadth of witnessing it. But toise alive, shell and all" (p. 186). how did he know that they did not If he is right, the boa is not always have it? Why, by peering into a constrictor, for she could hardly their eyes, he could tell you, and tell crush the tortoise, and so would you infallibly, that they could not, 'bolt" it as it stood. And it is and therefore did not, have it! He possible that the snakes that swallow gave it as an opinion that the eyes alive may constrict when there is to of snakes are immovable, and yet in be a fight for it. These matters his Wanderings he said that the simply involve a question of evilabarri snake "would appear to keep dence. Surely some information his eye fixed on me, as though suspi- could be procured in English cious, but that was all" (p. 190). collections of snakes, as to how Why could not an immovable eye they shed their skins, and seize and have a glowing coal kindled up inside of it? 66 * See note at page 22. swallow their prey, while in captivity, however they might do these while in a state of nature. are Waterton says:-"I have been in the midst of snakes for many years; I have observed them on the ground, on trees, in bushes, on bedsteads, and upon old mouldering walls" (p. 440); and adds very strongly :66 I have seen numberless snakes retire at my sudden approach, and [in addition to that] I have seen many remain quite still until I got up quite close to them" (p. 446), after having, in almost the previous breath, said, "As for snakes, I seldom saw them (p. 436). And, when we consider the immense extent of tropical America, and view its endless woods, we forced to admit that snakes are comparatively few. I have seen more monkeys in one day than I have found snakes during my entire sojourn in the forests. When I did fall in with them (and they were not wanted for dissection), whether they were poisonous or harmless, I would contemplate them for a few minutes ere I proceeded" (p. 432), offering them no molestation. Such evidence as Waterton's on the question before us would not be received in any court of justice, because he contradicts himself as regards the numbers of his snakes, and gives no information in regard to his authorities in support of his assertions. A very safe conclusion to draw would be, that Waterton's pursuit of snakes was to procure specimens to set up, leading to some incidental information about them, which certainly would not justify him in attempting, Pope-like, to speak ex cathedrâ on the subject. On his third journey he told us that he collected 230 birds and 2 large serpents, besides a few other animals. His editor says: "For every observation which Waterton had printed he had made at least a hundred" (p. 134). If this was intended to apply to snakes, it would have been interesting to have seen the ninety-and-nine "observations which he left in the wilderness of his memory. His information regarding snakes resembled an old Indian's medicine-bag-a collection of odds and ends of no intrinsic value, but of the first importance to him, to give him confidence in his movements and to conjure by, and which it would be sacrilege for any one to touch but himself. And woe would have been to that closet naturalist" who would have dared to touch his medicine-bag in his lifetime. He would have been scalped at once, and skinned at leisure for his temerity. II. 66 Charles Waterton died in 1865, aged 83 years. He spent his life in the study of natural history, principally if not almost entirely in ornithology, and the setting up of animals, and particularly birds, which seem to have been the end of his existence, and the breath of his nostrils. He entered upon the family estate of Walton Hall, Yorkshire, when he was 24 years of age, and surrounded part of it with a wall ten feet high, and did everything to carry out his favourite pursuit, giving absolute protection to every kind of animal, foxes and rabbits, I believe, only excepted. It would have argued poorly for him if he had not become an adept in his special studies, even if his genius for them had been of a common order; but he proved an unreliable authority outside of his sphere, and illustrated the truth that if the mind is allowed to run exclusively and for long on one subject, it becomes incapacitated for any other, even if it bears a cognate relation to it. My trouble in proving this as regards Waterton, in addition to what has been considered on the subject of snakes, will be to select material from his Essays, where it lies in profusion. Since I have the privilege of picking and choosing, I will begin with sunstroke. temperature into one described by himself as follows:-"There is seldom an entire day of calm in these forests. The trade-wind generally about ten o'clock in the sets in 66 morning" (Wanderings, 3d ed., p. He says:" I am not a believer in what is generally called sunstroke, or coup de soleil. To prove this, during several years I went out of the house exactly at twelve o'clock, and stood bareheaded under the heliscentre ray, in latitude six north of the equator, for a quarter of an hour. My companions were terrified for the result. I assured them that I apprehended no manner of danger" (p. 614). An intelligent West Indian informs me that he ran the risk of catching a fever—a modified form of "what is generally called a sunstroke." Sunstroke, however, is little known in the West Indies, perhaps for the reason of the gradual increase and steadiness of the heat, tempered by breezes and the peculiarity of the atmosphere, and not merely because the people expose themselves less than in other places. The same can The idea of sunstroke was, singube said of New Orleans, as distin- larly enough, tacked on to the quesguished from New York, where it is tion whether the pythoness at Lonvery common, there being a special don, in 1862, could hatch her eggs. hospital for its treatment, while the That, of course, he considered, in other public hospitals receive pa- his usual way, a granny's idea," tients, and each police station notwithstanding that a pythoness (which has a surgeon) is prepared hatched her eggs at Paris, about ten to treat cases temporarily. In New years previously, while the London York, where the temperature ranges one failed only in consequence of from say o to 100, the disease mani- the eggs having, from a variety of fests itself in connection with a causes, become addled, a living servariety of circumstances, such as pent having been taken out of an fatigue and exposure, weakness or egg at an early stage of the incubasickness, the weight of the clothes tion. Ordinary people would think worn, and dissipated habits, par- that all snakes would hatch their ticularly among the foreign popula- eggs in that way, if they did not tion. Waterton's system was doubt- know that the generality of them do less in excellent condition for a not; and that it would not be untropical climate. He ate moderate- reasonable if some of them did, as ly, and was a total abstainer, and he an intermediary between hatching had a thick head of hair, made them in the soil and bringing them thicker by frequent cropping, and far on towards hatching inside of very probably a skull to correspond, them, and then giving birth to them which he trained for years to an ex- in a way that is apparently yet to be posure, while standing at case," of discovered. Waterton did not seem only fifteen minutes, going out of to be troubled with ideas of that the house with his body in its natural | kind; his dogmas covered everything. |