jRA TTLE SNAKE HIST OR V. 271 



has culled information. Indeed, the book is a careful com- 

 pilation from all the previous writers of any worth, though 

 those only who mentioned the Brazilian serpents need be 

 here introduced to the reader. These, in describing some 

 unchanging peculiarities, and in giving us the vernacular 

 names then common, have been of much use in assisting 

 subsequent writers to identify certain species. 



Hakluyt, Hernandez, Master Anthony Kniuet, and many 

 others are quoted by Purchas, but of them all, ' No man hath 

 written so absolute a Discourse of Brazil as was taken from 

 a Portugall Frier and sold to Master Hakluit,' he tells us ; 

 giving at the same time a history of the persecution and 

 imprisonment of this unfortunate friar, whose unusual 

 intelligence seems to have rendered him an object of 

 suspicion. Thus do we who come after benefit by the 

 misfortunes of our predecessors, and thus has the stolen 

 ' Discourse ' of the sixteenth'century been turned to account 

 for our edification in the nineteenth. 



In the Portuguese friar's description of animals, it is not 

 difficult to separate the true snakes from the ' Serpentes with 

 foure Legges and aTaile,' or to identify the rattlesnakes among 

 them. Says the writer, ' The Boycininga is a Snake called of 

 the Bell : it is of a great Poison, but it maketh such a Noise 

 with a Bell it hath in its Tayle that it catcheth very few : 

 though it be so swift that they call it the flying Snake. His 

 Length is twelve or thirteen Spannes long. There is another 

 Boycininpeba. This also hath a Bell, but smaller. It is 

 blacke and very venomous.' 



These two may be Crotalus horridus and Crotalus 

 durissiiSy the two commonest ; or they may be only one 



