UTILITY AND DESTRUCTION OF REPTILES. 127 
The serpent does not appear to have any natural limit of 
growth, and we are therefore not authorized wholly to discredit 
the evidence of ancient naturalists in regard to the extraordi- 
nary dimensions which these reptiles are said by them to have 
sometimes attained. The use of firearms has enabled man to 
reduce the numbers of the larger serpents, and they do not often 
escape him long enough to arrive at the size ascribed to them by 
travellers a century or two ago. Captain Speke, however, shot 
a serpent in Africa which measured fifty-one and a half feet in 
length. 
Some enthusiastic entomologist will, perhaps, by and by dis- 
cover that insects and worms are as essential as the larger or- 
ganisms to the proper working of the great terraqueous machine, 
and we shall have as eloquent pleas in defence of the mosquito, 
and perhaps even of the tzetze-fly, as Toussenel and Michelet 
have framed in behalf of the bird. The silkworm, the lac in- 
sect, and the bee need no apologist; a gallnut produced by the 
puncture of a cynips on a Syrian oak is a necessary ingredient 
in the ink I am writing with, and from my windows I recog- 
nize the grain of the kermes and the cochineal in the gay habili- 
ments of the holiday groups beneath them. 
These humble forms of being are seldom conspicuous by mere 
mass, and though the winds and the waters sometimes sweep 
together large heaps of locusts and even of may-flies, their re- 
mains are speedily decomposed, their exuviee and their struc- 
tures form no strata, and still less does nature use them, as she 
does the calcareous and silicious cases and dwellings of animal- 
cular species, to build reefs and spread out submarine deposits, 
which subsequent geological action may convert into islands and 
even mountains.* 
bites of venomous serpents in the Bengal Presidency, in the year 1869, was 
11,416, and that in the whole of British India not less than 40,000 human lives 
are annually lost from this cause. In one small department, a reward of from 
three to six pence a head for poisonous serpents brought in 1,200 a day, and 
in two months the government paid £10,000 sterling for their destruction. 
* Although the remains of extant animals are rarely, if ever, gathered in 
sufficient quantities to possess any geographical importance by their mere 
