xiii. SNAKES. 187 



footed Kaffir, who was pushing a trolley up the valley, 

 chanced to step on the head of the dead snake. The 

 venom-fang pierced his foot, and he died in a few 

 hours. Here the creature had been not long dead. But 

 Sir J. Fayrer states that the poison may be kept for months 

 and years, dried between slips of glass, and still retain its 

 virulence. And the Bushmen are said to have mixed snake- 

 venom with euphorbia juice and other matters for the 

 poison with which they anointed their arrow-heads. 



It is stated that the blood of an animal bitten by a 

 venomous snake assumes poisonous properties. Frank 

 Buckland on one occasion having seen a rat bitten and 

 killed by a cobra, dissected off the skin to examine the 

 wound. Having discovered the two minute punctures 

 made by the poison-fangs, he scraped away with his finger- 

 nail the flesh on the inner side of the skin which he had 

 removed. Unfortunately he had shortly before been 

 cleaning his nail with a penknife, and had slightly sepa- 

 rated the nail from the skin beneath. When he had 

 completed his rapid examination of the rat, he walked 

 away, characteristically stuffing the skin into his pocket 

 (what strange things, alive and dead, did those pockets 

 often contain ! ). He had not walked a hundred yards before, 

 all of a sudden, he felt just as if somebody had come 

 behind him and struck him a severe blow on the head, 

 and at the same time experienced a most acute pain and 

 sense of oppression at the chest " as though a hot iron 

 had been run in, and a hundredweight put on the top of 

 it." He knew instantly from what he had read that he 

 was poisoned. Luckily he obtained ammonia and brandy, 

 but was ill for some days. "How virulent therefore," he 

 says, " must the poison of a cobra be ! It already had 

 been circulated in the body of the rat, from which I 

 had imbibed it at second-hand." From the account that 



