583 APPENDIX. 



had cut open, and then this said medical gentleman (who was he?) 

 gravely told the bystanders that this extreme point had done all the 

 mischief. By way of putting beyond all doubt his important dis- 

 covery, " he scratched with it the nose of a dog, and the dog died in 

 a few hours." 



Now, sir, as we are upon snakes, let me ask you, in the name of 

 the old Sarpent (as Jonathan calls him), when you read this blunder- 

 ing narrative, did you not recollect that the extreme point of all 

 serpents' fangs is a solid bone ? and that the aperture through which 

 the poison flows, when the snake is alive, is on the convex side of the 

 curved fang, at a distance from the point ? This being an absolute 

 fact, it is utterly impossible that the dog could have been poisoned 

 by a scratch. Suppose, for an instant, there was poison in the aper- 

 ture, that poison was in a dead state, and before it could have been 

 moistened, the booby of a doctor would have had to thrust the broken 

 fang into the nose till the orifice was covered, and there it must have 

 remained for some time before its contents could be in a state to 

 enter the circulation. Again, sir, did it not occur to you, that the 

 wound which the farmer received, and which was so slight "that the 

 pain felt was thought by him to have been from the scratch of a thorn," 

 could not, by any chance, have been from the bite of a serpent, as 

 you must have known, or at least you ought to have known, that the 

 sting from a snake's fang always causes instantaneous and most ex- 

 cruciating pain. So does the sting of our wasps and bees, which are 

 mere pigmies to the smallest of the poisonous snakes. The tooth of 

 a snake is fixed in the socket ; the fang of a snake is movable, and 

 invariably on the upper jaw. Now, I am decidedly of opinion that 

 no rattlesnake could strike the point of his fang through an American 

 farmer's boot. But, granting that Audubon's snake did in this case, 

 then the point of the fang must have been rankling in old Jonathan 

 Clodpole's flesh all the time he was walking home, for the boot would 

 fit just as closely to his leg after he had received his wound as before 

 it. What I have said of the dog will apply equally to the two 

 younger Doodles, who got their deaths by jumping into their father's 

 boots. But, sir, when you come to that part of the narrative where 

 you are told that the eldest son, twelve months after, put on his 

 father's old tormentors, and walked to church in them, did you not 



