1895-96-] Popular Delusions in Natural History. 175 



time ago now for the memory of details), for he goes on to 

 tell us that it was not till 1863, six years afterwards, that in 

 dissecting an African puff - adder, which had died in the 

 Zoological Gardens in London, he discovered a part of a 

 snake's body where he fancied "young snakes may not only 

 be received, but kept alive for a considerable time, and after- 

 wards sent forth alive and well." Judging from his descrip- 

 tion, this supposed discovery apparently resolves itself into 

 his coming upon the posterior non-cellular extremity of the 

 snake's lung, regarding which, as " its walls were composed of 

 fibrous tissue," he " at once saw that there was nothing to 

 prevent its becoming an admirable and comfortable receptacle 

 for a whole brood of young snakes. Unlike a stomach, it 

 contained no irritating gastric juice to injure or digest them ; 

 while above all, its free communication with the external air 

 would enable the young snakes to breathe in it as when they 

 were in the open air itself." So he concludes : " After making 

 this discovery I no longer doubted that poisonous snakes 

 swallow their young with the object of protecting them, and 

 can retain them within their own bodies until the danger is 

 passed with perfect impunity." 



It is indeed strange that a man who had passed through 

 the scientific training which is inseparable from a medical 

 education, and who, moreover, had attained the fellowship of 

 the Eoyal Society of London, could write anything so utterly 

 unscientific as the long letter to the ' Field ' from which I 

 have just given the above quotations. Note that Dr Harley's 

 entire story rests upon the assertion of some children that 

 they, and not he, had seen the young adders go down their 

 mother's throat. As he implicitly believed in the truth of 

 this assertion, of course the young adders could not be in the 

 oviduct ; and as to the stomach, if they were in the habit of 

 going into the parent's stomach, they would be digested or 

 suffocated. Then, with the point of location still unsettled, 

 he actually cares so little about the matter as to leave the 

 dead snake lying on the roadside. Then about six years 

 afterwards he comes upon the non-cellular air-sac at the 

 extremity of a snake's lung, which, without any evidence, he 

 assumes to have been the place into which the young snakes 

 are received. And finally, more than thirty years afterwards 



