124 UTILITY AND DESTEUCTION OF REPTILES. 



useless to their great enemy. The most formidable foes of tKe 

 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 dis- 

 tance of a foot, he shoots out his long, shmy tongue, and rarelj 

 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 consume as egg, worm 

 and chrysalis, in their earher metamorphoses. The serpents feed 

 much upon insects, as well as upon mice, moles and small reptiles, 

 including also other snakes. 



In temperate cHmates, snakes are consumed by scarcely any 

 beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they have few danger- 

 ous enemies but man, though in the tropics other animals prey 

 upon them.* It is doubtful whether any species of serpent has 

 been exterminated within the human period, and even the dense 

 population of China has not been able completely to rid itself of 

 the viper. They have, however, almost entirely disappeared from 

 particular locahties. The rattlesnake is now whoUy unknown in 

 many large districts where it was extremely common haH a cen- 

 tury ago, and Palestine has long been, if not absolutely free from 

 venomous serpents, at least very nearly so.f 



* It is 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 would seem to show that the supposed enmity is 

 wholly imaginary. Redlitz, United States Survey of Territories, vol. iv. , chap. i. , 

 p. 264, says, however, that wild pigs, peccaries and deer are destructive ene- 

 mies of the rattlesnake, and it is 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. Ob- 

 serving that the starlings, stornelli, which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, 

 carried something from their nests and dropped it upon the ground about as 

 often as they brought food to their young, I watched their proceedings, and 

 found everj' day lying near the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, 

 and, in a few cases, small lizards, which had, in every instance, lost about two 

 inches of the tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their nestlings, and 

 threw away the remainder. 



f Russell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, and 

 states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the bite of 



