28 VENOMS 
Habitat: France (especially Vendée, the Forest of Fontaine- 
bleau, and the South), Pyrenees, Alsace-Lorraine, the Black Forest, 
Switzerland, Italy and Sicily, and the Tyrol. 
This viper especially fre- 
quents dry, rocky, and arid 
hillsides, which are exposed 
to the sun. Like the adder, 
it hibernates in tree-trunks 
and oid walls. It lays from 
6 to 15 eggs, from which 
the living young immediately 
issue, provided with poison. 
It feeds upon small rodents, 
worms, insects, and young 
birds. Raptorial  birds, 
storks, and hedgehogs pursue 
it and devour it in large 
Fic. 22.—Vipera aspis. (Natural size.) 
(From the Forest of Fontainebleau.) numbers. 
Vipera latastii. 
Intermediate between V. aspis and V. ammodytes. Snout less 
turned up into a corneous appendage than in the latter. Head 
covered with small, smooth, or feebly keeled, subimbricate scales, 
among which an enlarged frontal shield may sometimes be dis- 
tinguished ; 5—7 longitudinal series of scales between the supra- 
ocular shields ; 9—13 scales round the eyes; 2 or 3 series between 
the eyes and the labials; nasal shield entire, separated from the 
rostral by a naso-rostral. Body scales in 21 rows, strongly keeled ; 
125—147 ventrals ; 32—43 subcaudals. 
Coloration grey or brown above, with a longitudinal zigzag 
band, usually spotted with white; head with or without spots on 
