THE COBRA AND OTHER SERPENTS. 67 



THE COBRA AND OTHER SERPENTS. 



By G. R. O'RETLLY, 

 coeeesponding membee of the eoyal zoological society of ireland. 



DURING a three years' residence in southern Africa cobras 

 and other snakes were my pets and most intimate compan- 

 ions. They occupied my bedroom ; they sunned themselves in 

 my windows ; they coiled themselves in my armchair and on my 

 study table, and made themselves quite at home among my book 

 shelves and bric-a-brac. Baby cobras were born into my hands, 

 and adult cobras accompanied me coiled in my pocket whenever 

 I went out to take slj'- observations, through a binocular glass, of 

 the movements of their brothers and sisters still free among the 

 rocks and bushes of plain or hillside. 



Above all his peers in the ophidian kingdom, the royal cobra 

 claimed my chief attention. His beauty, the web of Oriental 

 romance in which his name is intertwined, and the dreadful 

 destruction of human life with which he is credited, make him 

 to all of us an exceedingly interesting animal. As man alone 

 stands up and walks erect, the acknowledged king among living 

 things, so it is only the cobra of all the reptile kind that raises 

 himself perpendicularly from the ground and expands his neck 

 as if in fancied pride of his power to dispute with humanity 

 the supremacy over animal life. Year after year, over the whole 

 of southern Asia, but especially in the Indian Peninsula, a vast 

 multitude of men, women, and children fall victims to his deadly 

 fangs. If each year, within the bounds of British India alone, a 

 town of ten thousand inhabitants were to be utterly depopulated 

 by a painful form of death, and if this calamity had been con- 

 stantly recurring, as far back through the centuries as history 

 has record of, who would not be filled with commiseration for a 

 people so afflicted ? And yet in that same country this number 

 of human beings is annually carried off by the bite of poisonous 

 serpents, and the world looks for it as a matter of course. Thus 

 the dreaded cholera itself is not a greater destroyer of human 

 life, as it is but an occasional visitant. As the cobra is blamed 

 for nearly all this ar^palling mortality, we need not seek out fur- 

 ther reason for giving him the title of " king of deadly serpents." 



Sir Joseph Fayrer, in his magnificent Thanatophidia of India, 

 gives us copious information regarding his poison, its terrible 

 work among the Indian peoples, and the various methods of 

 counteracting its effects ; and more recently our own able in- 

 quirer. Dr. Weir Mitchell, has given us its analysis. But as 

 regards the story of cobra life itself, cobra capabilities, and cobra 

 idiosyncrasies, we are still at the mercy of Pliny and his success- 



