386 SNAKES, 



belonging to the British Museum in 1849, he enumerated 

 elev^en genera and thirty-seven species. Wallace, 1876, 

 gives eleven genera and forty species, the eastern examples 

 of which belong to India, Siam, Java, Borneo, Tartary, 

 Thibet, Japan, and Formosa. Still more recently some 

 belonging to the Western States of America have, I believe, 

 been added by Cope or Coues, the latter informing us that 

 up to the date of his paper, 1878, eighteen species and 

 upwards of the rattlesnake proper had been described in 

 the United States, nearly all in the west and south-west. 

 So, as those vast deserts are being explored, new species 

 are continually discovered. 



Of the Indian species of CrotalidcB, those minus a rattle, 

 Fayrer says that they are chiefly in Malaya and Indo-China. 

 Many of them, the Trimeresiiri^ are arboreal, and like the 

 foliage in colour. They have the viperine aspect, but are 

 ' less formidable than their American congeners,' being of 

 much smaller dimensions. Only one, Halys, has anything 

 approaching to a rudimentary rattle, a tail ending in a spine. 

 Of the Trimeresiu'i, the tree species, Fayrer affirms that few 

 deaths are ascribed to them. Some attain to above three feet 

 in length. He thinks a feeble person might die of their bite. 

 They are of a sluggish habit, and lie quietly hidden among 

 the leaves of low bushes and ferns. They will even suffer 

 themselves to be moved without attempting to bite, but 

 one that was pressed to the ground with a stick struck so 

 hard as to break both its fangs. They feed chiefly on 

 insects. Their habits are crepuscular if not nocturnal, and 

 Fayrer does not state positively that they or any of the 

 Indian Crotalidce are viviparous. 



