IN THE SHETLANDS 347 
on the prairies, or of a cavy in the swamps of a 
Brazilian forest. With the constrictors, however, it 
is different. The smaller ones, indeed, seem to retain 
their full vigour, or, if not that, something very like 
it, for they are capable—as I have myself seen—of 
killing a rat almost instantaneously. It is different 
with the huge pythons, or anacondas, which lose their 
force, together with their appetite, in confinement, so 
that their languid and clumsy efforts—lasting for a 
long period—to take the life of their victims, may be 
compared to those of a drunken headsman with a 
blunt axe. Manifestly, therefore, to give them such 
a creature as a goat to mumble, and in such a sort of 
fern-case as they occupy, is a revolting thing ; but I 
cannot see that a flagrant abuse like this condemns the 
principle. Were a combined rockery and shrubbery, 
as large as a good-sized garden, accorded the python, 
say, and were it in some hot country, the sun of 
which acted upon its system like Falstaff’s “ excellent 
sherris sack ”—its own, for instance, at the Cape, or in 
Durban—then I should recognise no wrong done in 
introducing a goat or pig (preferably, however, a wild 
animal) into its sanctum. The conditions would, in 
that case, be the same, or closely similar, to those which 
govern under nature, nor can I see that it matters 
much, in ethics, whether a snake eats its dinner inside, 
or outside, a paling. If it is wrong to see it do so in 
the one case, it is wrong in the other, and the conten- 
tion that it is wrong in either sanctions the principle 
of an officious interference in the ways of the animal 
