UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 125 
checking the wanton sacrifice of millions of the smaller birds, 
which are of no real value as food, but which, as we have seen, 
render a most important service by battling, in our behalf, as 
well as in their own, against the countless legions of humming 
and of creeping things, with which the prolific powers of insect 
life would otherwise cover the earth. 
Utility and Destruction of Reptiles. 
The disgust and fear with which the serpent is so universally 
regarded expose him to constant persecution by man, and per- 
haps no other animal is so relentlessly sacrificed by him. Never- 
theless, snakes as well as lizards and other reptiles are not wholly 
useless to their great enemy. The most formidable foes of the 
insect, and even of the small rodents, are the reptiles. The 
chameleon approaches the insect perched upon the twig of a 
tree, with an almost imperceptible slowness of motion, until, at 
the distance of a foot, he shoots out his long, slimy tongue, and 
rarely fails to secure the victim. Even the slow toad catches 
the swift and wary housefly in the same manner; and in the 
warm countries of Europe, the numerous lizards contribute very 
essentially to the reduction of the insect population, which they 
both surprise in the winged state upon walls and trees, and con- 
sume as egg, worm, and chrysalis, in their earlier metamor- 
phoses. The serpents feed much upon insects, as well as upon 
mice, moles, and small reptiles, including also other snakes. 
In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any 
beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they have few dan- 
gerous enemies but man, though in the tropics other animals 
prey upon them.* It is doubtful whether any species of ser- 
* It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the popular 
belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and careful 
experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the supposed 
enmity is wholly imaginary. It is however affirmed in an article in Nature, 
June 11, 1872, p. 215, that the pigs have exterminated the rattlesnake in some 
parts of Oregon, and that swine are destructive to the cobra de capello in 
India. Observing that the starlings, stornelli, which bred in an old tower in 
