SOMETHING ABOUT SNAKES. 493 



mon village pigs in India, wliicli are well known as scavengers 

 and carrion-eaters. They will kill and eat any snake that conies 

 in their way, and the hide of their hard and hairy bodies and legs 

 is almost snake-proof. But if a cobra bites a pig on a soft place, 

 so as to plant his poison under the skin, that pig will surely die. 



The python, or boa constrictor, is comparatively common in 

 Bengal, and sometimes grows to a great size. The first one that I 

 saw was said to be twenty -four feet long, but it had been dead for 

 several days, and the stench from it was longer than the street in 

 which it was being exhibited to a crowd of admiring natives, and 

 I could not venture to measure it. I saw another, which was said 

 to be twenty-one feet long, being carried dead through the street 

 of Dacca, but was unable to stop to measure it for myself. An 

 officer, whose veracity I did not mistrust, told me he had found 

 one in Cachar twenty-five feet long, which had committed suicide 

 by swallowing a buck hog-deer, of which the horns injured and 

 cut through the intestines of the snake before the gastric juices 

 could soften the horns. There was a plentiful supply of pythons 

 at the Zoological Gardens in Calcutta. One large one, which 

 measured nearly eighteen feet, sat most patiently for more than 

 a month over a batch of its eggs, and it was hoped that her per- 

 severance and motherly affection would be rewarded by a young 

 brood. But for some unknown reason the eggs were all addled. 

 During her long incubation the mother snake was never seen to 

 quit her eggs ; and she would take no kind of food, although rats 

 and chickens were offered to her from day to day. 



It is not every one who has seen a python take a meal. It is 

 usually averse to dead food ; but it is very partial to a live rabbit 

 or a chicken or a guinea-pig or by preference a rat. The python 

 seems to know that the rat will try to escape, and he gives it no 

 time or quarter. With a rapidity that can hardly be conceived, 

 he seizes the rat with his mouth, and the fatal coil passes round 

 the creature, squeezing all life out of it, and reducing the body to 

 the form of an elongated sausage, which the snake lubricates with 

 its own slime and swallows entire. If a fowl is put into a py- 

 thon's cage, the snake sometimes seems to take no notice, and the 

 frightened bird, finding that no harm comes to it, begins to ruffle 

 its feathers and to peck about, occasionally trying its beak on the 

 snake's skin. But after a while the end of the python's tail may 

 be seen to quiver with a strange emotion, while the small black 

 beady eye is fixed upon the fowl. Suddenly there is a convulsion. 

 The snake has moved and the fowl has disappeared, and can only 

 be discovered by the end of a feather or two protruding from the 

 coils in the python's neck which have crushed the bird's life out. 

 In its natural state the python will catch a deer or a wild pig, and 

 crush it in the powerful coils of its neck. There is a well-authen- 



