1 8 INTRODUCTION, 



sufferings inflicted by the feline families and by birds of prey, 

 the countless shoals of the smaller fish devoured — swallowed 

 alive too ! — by larger ones, or caught (and not too tenderly) 

 for our own use. These things we dismiss from our minds, 

 and accept as inevitable. We do not ventilate them in 

 daily journals. Nor do we take our children to the 

 slaughter-house or the surgery for their entertainment ; or 

 repair thither ourselves for the sake of minutely discussing 

 afterwards the sufferings we have witnessed. You will, I 

 hope, discover that the pain Inflicted by the constrictor or 

 the viper Is not, after all, so acute as It is by some imagined 

 to be. The venomous bite of the latter causes almost 

 immediate insensibility ; the frog which the ring snake ate 

 probably died of suffocation, which also produces insen- 

 sibility ; the constriction of the boa — in Its natural condition 

 — produces also a speedy death. Besides, as Dr. Andrew 

 Wilson, in a paper on this subject, has explained to us, the 

 sufferings of a frog or a rat are not like 07Lr sufferings. 

 Their brain and nerves are of a lower order.^ 



Permit me, therefore, in the outset, to dismiss from these 

 pages the question of cruelty as not being a branch of 

 zoology ; and as we cannot prevent snakes from eating 

 frogs, or the vipers from catching field mice (nor need we 

 wish to do so, or the small quarry would soon become too 

 many for us), let us examine the curious construction of 

 a snake's head and jaw-bones that enables it to accomplish 

 the task so easily. 



With reference to the rapid development of science, it has 



1 'Snakes and their Food,' J/^rtt'r;/ Thought^^dSi. iSSi, in reply to a paper 

 in Time of the previous September. 



