SNAKES. 445 



WALTON HALL, NEAR WAKEFIELD, 

 June 23, 1849. 



SIR, Your favour of March 6th, not having the post-town on 

 the address, travelled far and near before it reached me. I was very 

 busy at the time of its arrival, and, seeing that its contents did not 

 require an immediate answer, I put it aside for a while. I now beg 

 to thank you for the information it contains, and for the kind offer of 

 your services. 



As I have never been at the Cape of Good Hope, it would be 

 rash in me to question the correctness of what you have narrated to 

 me, or to reject the testimony of those who have supplied you with 

 remarks on the habits of your snakes. However, you will pardon 

 me if I venture to comment on that passage in your letter which tells 

 of a ' viper which was still asleep/ and of another which l looked 

 menacingly ' and ' flashed his eyes.' No snakes have eyelids. 

 Wherefore, after numberless inspections of snakes, I have never, in 

 one single solitary instance, been able to perceive whether the snake 

 were asleep or awake ; nor could I ever trust to the eyes of a snake 

 for a sure proof that it were dead, although I had separated the head 

 frm the body, and the head had ceased to move. Not so with 

 animals which have eyelids. Again, I could never convince myself 

 that I saw a snake flash its eyes, or even move its eyes. The eyes 

 of all snakes, in every country of the world, have a scale to guard 

 them ; and this scale differs in no manner of way from the rest of 

 the scales which cover the body. Knowing, then, that the eye is a 

 prisoner, as it were, within this fixed and immovable scale, the mo- 

 ment I beheld Audubon's most incorrect and absurd drawing of a 

 rattlesnake attacking a mocking-bird's nest, I pronounced it to be a 

 cheat, and a disgraceful caricature. If you ask me whether I extend 

 my remark, ' that I never saw a snake tarry for half a moment after 

 I had disturbed it/ to all snakes ? I should say I do with the sole 

 exception of those enormous ones whose size and strength put men 

 completely in their power. Such monsters, if their stomachs were 

 empty, would, no doubt, seize the first man that approached their 

 resting-place. But we had an instance, in the woody swamps of the 

 west coast of Essequibo, in South America, of a negro mistaking a 



