1 92 Waterton's Letter to Professor Jameson. 



1 that the pain felt was thought by him to have been from the 

 scratch of a thorn,' could not, by any chance, have been from 

 the bite of a serpent ; as ... a sting from a snake's fang always 

 causes instantaneous and most excruciating paim So does 

 the sting of our wasps and bees, which are mere pygmies to 

 the smallest of the poisonous snakes. The tooth of a snake is 

 fixed in the socket ; the fang of a snake is movable, and 

 invariably on the upper jaw. Now, I am decidedly of opinion 

 that no rattlesnake could strike the point of his fang through 

 an American farmer's boot. [Mr. Waterton has, in a note 

 in a previous page, this remark : — "I know the thickness of 

 an American farmer's boot; and I also know that the largest 

 rattlesnake of America cannot strike his fang through it so 

 that the aperture through which the poison issues can be seen 

 inside the boot."] But granting that Audubon's snake did it 

 [that is, did strike the point of the fang, not the aperture in 

 it out of which the poison issues, through the boot] in this 

 case, then the point of the fang must have been rankling in 

 old Jonathan Clodpole's flesh all the time he was walking 

 home ; for the boot would fit just as closely to his leg after 

 he had received his wound as it had done before he received 

 it." Mr. Waterton, continuing, deems it matter of marvel 

 that the eldest son could, twelve months after, " walk and sit 

 in the same boots all day, and only just get a slight scratch 

 on the leg when pulling them off at night to go to bed ; " and 

 asks, in reference to this case, and to that in which t( the 

 other brother put them on about two years after, and got his 

 death also by a scratch, . . . whence the poison came? . . . The 

 story of this depopulating . . . boot . . . was current when I 

 was a boy. With the exception of a few interpolations by 

 Audubon, this very same story . . . was considered a good 

 joke some fifty or sixty years back. The late Professor Bar- 

 ton, of the University of Pennsylvania, investigated it at the 

 period of his publishing his pamphlets on the rattlesnake ; 

 and it turned out to be an arrant yankce-doodle hoax." 



A Treatise on Structural Botany, by, it is understood, Dr. 

 Lindley, is published in Nos. J 79. and 181. of the Library 

 of Useful Knowledge. The numbers are 6d. each, and the 

 two include 64 pages and 80 woodcuts. 



Anon. : Popular Botany, Physiological and Systematic, with 

 numerous woodcuts. Smith and Orr. 



A work whose nature is to correspond to this title is about 

 to be published. 



