A COLLECTION OF LIVE ANIMALS 185 



which I gathered in a fenced area of about half an acre behind 

 our club-house : a hedgehog, a porcupine, a weasel, turtles, and, 

 above all, serpents, all the local species, including rattle- 

 snakes from Mount Tom, and a few foreign forms. One notable 

 accession was a boa-constrictor of small size, about ten feet long. 

 This collection gave me great pleasure, but some care and ex- 

 pense. It was much resorted to by visitors, being unhappily 

 the only open-air free show of animals ever existing about Bos- 

 ton. On Sunday afternoons there would be a throng of inter- 

 ested people to see the little exhibition. It found an odd finish 

 through the horror inspired by the serpents. A rumor got out 

 that a python thirty feet in length had escaped from the col- 

 lection and was winding up and down of nights, seeking whom 

 it should devour. Fancy located it for a time under a cellar- 

 less schoolhouse in Somerville, a neighboring town. I was ad- 

 vised by the chief of police that I had better allay the excite- 

 ment by making an end of my amusement. So the harmless 

 creatures went into safe-keeping in alcohol. 



That there was no danger from the escape of the captives is 

 shown by the fact that but one of them got out of bounds in the 

 two years they were kept. One night when I made the round 

 of the cages, a hedgehog was missing. There was a tracking 

 snow on the ground ; so a dozen of us started with lanterns to 

 run it down, and at the end of our run we recaptured it. Years 

 afterward, my colleague the venerated Professor Henry W. 

 Torrey used often to tell me of his sore experience with a gang 

 of ruffians who at midnight came over his back fence and with 

 torches searched his premises through and went on. It was 

 evidently a painful episode in his quiet academic life, one that 

 showed the latent iniquity of human society; the memory of it 

 stayed by him until his death some thirty years later. The profit 

 I have had from my little experiments with captive animals, 

 and a lifelong close connection with our barnyard creatures, 

 has shown me that one cannot be a real biologist without such 

 opportunities. It is possible for a student to gain a vast amount 



