A POPULAR TREATISE ON INDIAN SNAKES. 549 



Bertram * S J., records the testimony of a friend of his, who ex- 

 perimented on himself, in the following terms : — " I hold the fact from 

 his own mouth. One day a lively green snake was brought to him, 

 and he was assured that it had not spent its venom in any way 

 previously. He put his finger into its mouth, took care to place it 

 under the fangs, and then squeezed the jaws together, so as to drive the 

 fangs into the flesh. * * * Well, no result followed, not the 

 slightest ache of any kind." This substantiates in a very conclusive 

 way the experiences of others. However, a sampwallah employed by 

 me in Bangalore came to me on the 5th September this year, and pro- 

 duced two green whipsnakes, male and female, which, he declared, he had 

 observed " in copula." In capturing them he was viciously bitten on the 

 left hand by one of them, at about noon that day. At 4 p.m. when I saw 

 him the hand and forearm were greatly swollen, and he said felt numb. 

 He was in no pain. I saw him again a week later, and he told me the 

 swelling subsided in about two days and that he had felt none the worse 

 in his general health. Russellf says : " Its bite on chickens tried 

 repeatedly produced no other effect than pain." The poison gland is 

 rudimentary, and my dissections and observations lead me to believe 

 that it is solid like a mammalian salivary gland, and incapable of storing 

 poison. Whatever truth may lie in this assertion, the potency of the 

 poison must be admitted to be extremely feeble when GreenJ says that 

 young lizards will sometimes take 20 minutes to die in the grasp of its 

 jaws, and on such a statement one may reasonably believe that the victim 

 succumbed to mechanical influences alone. I lately witnessed one speci- 

 men in captivity seize and devour a frog. It grasped the frog's body 

 close behind the forelimb, and held on tenaciously in spite of the frog in 

 its struggles turning the snake over and over. After more than 20 

 minutes the snake began, through the agency of the jaws alone, shifting 

 its grasp towards its victim's snout, and then commenced swallowing. 

 Thirty-six minutes elapsed before the frog was wholly swallowed, and it 

 was kicking feebly to the end. It has nevertheless been proved that the 

 secretion of the parotid (salivary) gland has toxic properties. Major 

 Alcock, I.M.S., F.R.S., and Captain Rogers, I.M.S., have conclusively 

 demonstrated § that mice die when injected subcutaneously with a saline 



* Snakes and their Venom, Trichinopoly, 1897, p. 1 1 . 

 t Ind. Serp., Vol. 1, p. 17. 



X Spolia Zeylanica, Vol. 1, Pt. II., Jnne 1903, p. 1. 

 § Proc. Royal Soc, Vol. 70, p. 451. 



