208 Appendix. — Influence of the Ash on the Rattlesnake. 



P. S. A portion of the surplus revenue of the United States, might 

 be usefully appropriated in founding state museums of the kind I 

 have described ; and it would also be desirable for the general gov- 

 ernment, to have a complete suite of European specimens at Wash- 

 ington for the use of Congress. 



Confirmation of Judge Woodruff's account of the influence of the 



ash on the rattlesnake ; by Mr. William R. Morris. 



Dover, (Del.) Jan. 25, 1836. 



TO PROF. SILLIMAN. 



Dear Sir — I observed recently, in the Baltimore Chronicle, a re- 

 publication of an extract from the Journal of Science, which I had 

 met with about a year ago, giving an account of the surprising effects 

 of the twigs and branches of the white ash in disarming and subdu- 

 ing the rattlesnake, as tested by an experiment of Judge Woodruff, 

 some years since, in the northern part of the state of Ohio. 



Judge Woodruff, according to my apprehension, seems to have 

 felt his experiment to have been merely the establishment of what 

 he had hitherto deemed a popular superstition, as a positive matter 

 of fact. He seems not to have suspected its being, as it indeed was, 

 a modern test (and applied to a reptile not included even within the 

 wide range of his knowledge) of a statement made by Pliny the 

 naturalist, more than seventeen hundred years ago, and in a lan- 

 guage now dead, that "a serpent will rather creep into the fire than 

 over a twig of ash." I have not taken the trouble to point out this 

 coincidence between ancient authority and recent experience, in or- 

 der to disparage the credit of Judge Woodruff's experiment, (for 

 which 1 have no doubt that he is entitled to the claim of perfect ori- 

 ginality,) but rather to support the suggestions made by him upon 

 this subject, by an argument depending upon his very unconscious- 

 ness of such a coincidence, and moreover to suggest, on the authori- 

 ty of Pliny, a similar application to other noxious varieties of the 

 serpent kind. I confess that I also felt amused and interested by 

 this example of the manner in which phenomena brought before one 

 age of the world, are, after having been neglected and forgotten, 

 again presented, with the same aspect of novelty, to another. 



