"In the engraving will be found a

He here finds young that had not been born, and gives that as a triumphant reason that vipers do not swallow their young! He might have dissected various vipers, showing eggs ranging from the condition in which the foetus could not be discovered with the naked eye, to the time of birth, and said that these dissections prove the same thing!

A scientific, or even commonsense, naturalist will not necessarily stoop so low as to demand ocular proof of snakes swallowing their young. He ascertains that vipers pass their young with a covering on them the original egg attenuated to the last degree-which breaks as it leaves the mother, or immediately after it touches the ground; and are killed with young inside of them, sometimes upwards of seven inches long, and divested of a covering; and he concludes at once that the young were swallowed. And his opinion is confirmed by the fact of oviparous snakes being killed with young inside of them that were hatched in the soil, which proves beyond doubt that they must have been swallowed. Ocular testimony confirms the opinion in both instances that the young were swallowed.

As I have already said, about half of Contributions to Natural History appeared in Land and Water, and the other half were in Mr. Buckland's possession for several months before publication. Among these last was a paper read by Prof. G. Brown Goode, before the American Science Convention, in 1873, in which was found the positive evidence of nearly a hundred people, from various parts of the United

fact, particularly Prof. Sydney J. Smith, of the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale College, who "added to the testimony of the paper his personal evidence that he had seen, with his own eyes, young snakes entering and issuing from the mouth of an older one." He was also in possession of an appendix to the work, bearing the title of Mr. Frank Buckland and White of Selborne, that answered by anticipation all that he has advanced in his article under review. All the evidence contained in these counted

for nothing in Mr. Buckland's estimation. He says that "for something like thirty years" he has been labouring to ascertain whether or not vipers swallow their young; so that we have his own evidence to satisfy us that during all that time he has been merely trifling with the subject.

In his edition of White's Natural

History of Selborne Mr. Buckland, as we have seen, says that a correspondence on this subject takes place in Land and Water almost every year." This was illustrated by J. A. D., on the 16th of December, 1876, when he said that he saw a viper swallow her young; and on the same day by Wm. G. Gard, who said :

"I can be under no delusion whatever about the case. I saw the mother

and young ones; I saw the young ones leased from her stomach by its being enter her mouth; and I saw them reripped open by my father, and I saw them killed."

On the 30th Francis Edwards testified to the phenomenon having been seen by Isaac Mitchell, a farm labourer; and on the 6th of January, 1877, Mr. Gard, in reply to some meaningless cavilling of "Lawyer C." about the fact being "im

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the privilege of speaking of him in his public capacity, since he is "a bar in the way"-the cause of unnecessary trouble-in having the question of the viper swallowing her young admitted as a fact in natural history. And he and his friends can have no reason of complaint against me for doing so, inasmuch as he has treated the subject capriciously, and not with that candour and courtesy which the sacred deposit of truth" called for. My opinion, then, of him is that he is a wonderfully overrated man, but in high esteem in England among conventional people who, even although of high education and intelligence, are not qualified to judge him in questions of natural history, or who have never heard his merits discussed, or who will not take the trouble to look into them, and will almost resent it being done by others. In reality he is, for the most part, but a kind of broker in natural history facts and anecdotes-almost every one sending him all kinds of articles and odds and ends connected with the subject, of which he becomes the depositary and registrar, to be referred to as occasion calls for. In this capacity he would be a useful and interesting member of society, if he accurately arranged and thoroughly digested his information, and dealt it out correctly, giving his authorities, after their information had been well tested and confirmed, for everything with which he favoured the public, so that it could always be depended on. And then his labours would be too multifarious to secure accuracy on all occasions. In denying that Charles Waterton was a scientific naturalist I said that

The same may be asserted, in a much greater degree, of the relation

in which Mr. Buckland stands to natural history generally (for it is almost the reverse of Waterton's), whatever might be said of him as a taxidermist and anatomist (the labours of his own hands), or in any particular department of natural history that he may have practically studied to advantage. Witness, for example, his amazing remarks, given at page 189, about a stream of viperlings, alive and active, forced out of a viper by the pressure of the foot," being "in the egg and not yet born, but squeezed out of the mouth"; and that vipers do not swallow their young because cats do not do it! Could a "naturalist," with the overwhelming amount of evidence before him, ever have given expression to two such opinions?

The son of, and "the successor in natural science to, the Dean of Westminster, the well-known Bridgewater writer, lately a surgeon in the Life Guards, the natural history editor of Land and Water, and the leading commissioner of the fisheries-preceded by his page and secretary-Mr. Buckland presents an imposing aspect to all kinds of "poor people,' who would rather not offend him, or the society in which he figures so prominently, and far less call in question his authority or almost his infallibility in natural history. So divided and subdivided is the press, with its various spheres so clearly defined, that journals whose province is not natural history will not interfere with him in disputed points, but will rather say, "We leave that to Mr. Buckland.' Even papers on natural history seem to have a delicacy in meddling with him, on account of his editorial and official standing, and his peculiar relation to a large part of the community interested in the popular aspects of the subject; while naturalists of admitted scientific reputa

tion, in their respective branches, not regarding him as a reliable authority on the many questions on which he is so ready to give so absolute a decision, evidently will not enter the sphere of which he is the luminary. Having thus substantially a clear course before him, he acts as if he considered himself society's darling, that can do pretty much what he pleases in regard to natural history, and defy any moral magistrate British and especially American--to commit him or bind him over. He rather went over the mark, however, in marring the sacred text of White; after which there is hardly anything for him to be guilty of but contempt of majesty and sacrilege.

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The phrase presumptuous inefficiency "applied by the Examiner to his edition of White is a bitter expression, and all the more bitter because the editor had apparently to decline using it in a formal impeachment of the writer by name. That purpose would have been served had I succeeded in getting part of the preceding article at page 191, from In White's" to the end of it, with my name attached, inserted in a London journal which I always considered one of independence, and the special medium for pointing out the unpardonable liberties taken with White.

"Presumptuous inefficiency" is. absolute truth when applied to Mr. Buckland's treatment of the viper question, where he has been caught, as it were, in a trap from which there is no living extrication; so that no one need look to him, even after his thirty years' labour, to have that very interesting point in natural history decided; and about which there need be no controversy, international or otherwise. Besides vipers swallowing their young, I repeat what I have said in the work:

"I lay it down as an axiom that we must hold that all snakes [when living

in a state of nature] swallow their young, till the opposite can be proved of any particular species of them" (p. 29).

On paying a visit this year (1878), about the 7th of April, to Weehawken, near Hoboken, in New Jersey, opposite New York, where snakes have been killed by the railroad trains passing over them while lying along or on the rails, for the heat of the sun concentrated in the iron (p. 29), I noticed, here and there, dead garter snakes of all sizes, lying sometimes three together, too fresh-looking to have been killed last year; and I made inquiries of a man in the immediate vicinity, who has mowed the marsh there for many years. He said that they made their first appearance in the early part of March-so early and mild was the season-and in great force about the 1st of April, when the children and more grown-up people turned out and killed many of them, some in the open air and others on turning over the stones to get at them. This man, intelligent and doubtless in this matter reliable, after having had many opportunities for noticing snakes, assured me, on being asked generally, "what he knew about snakes," that he had seen a black and a garter snake (both oviparous) swallow their young. He was minute in his description in the latter instance. He said that he saw the snake at a very short distance, then distinctly heard a peculiar noise, and saw her open widely her mouth, and the young snakes, coming quickly from every direction, and in a confused-looking scramble, enter it; making a scene very interesting to witness. He then put his foot on her, immediately below the head, just as the last one went down her throat, and seized her by the tail, and ripped her open with his knife, without touching the stomach proper, and let out a number of young ones, which were several weeks old, so far as he could judge. He said that the peculiar noise served the