Menage Expedition to the Philippines 157 



We put up fourteen skins of animals of both sexes and all sizes. 

 We never saw anything equal the abundance of deer. We killed 

 them with rifles and with shotguns, and caught them alive wiih 

 dogs, and one of the party actually succeeded in catching a very 

 young fawn, with his hands alone. 



All told we got about 140 birds. An interesting mammal cap- 

 tured was a fine specimen of the Manis, a scaly ant-eater. It is 

 identical with the one found in Palawan. We were able to get 

 only a single very poor skin of native .preparation. W^e secured 

 two specimens of a squirrel which we never before obtained, but 

 presume Mr. March got it before us. We also gathered a number 

 of land shells of good species. Some are identical with Palawai> 

 forms, while others are peculiar to Culion or rather to the Cala- 

 maines group. 



But by far our best success was with large snakes, of which 

 we got two. The first, which is also the larger, we caught while 

 in the interior. We had been told many stories about large 

 snakes, so when we got among the savages we offered a substan- 

 tial reward to anyone who would find and show to us a large 

 snake. Soon after our arrival, two savages came to the house 

 and said they were ready to take us to the "house" of a big 

 snake, not over a mile and a half away. So we prepared ourselves 

 for work and set out. We were conducted to a large hollow log, 

 lying on the bank of a small stream, and through a crack in the 

 log, we could see a portion of two coils of what seemed to be a 

 snake 16 or 17 feet long. We stopped up both ends of the log, 

 enlarged the hole near the snake, and after some trouble, suc- 

 ceeded in getting several strong rattans around the animal's 

 body. Then the hole was still farther enlarged and we began to 

 pull. That caused the snake to move and we soon saw that we 

 had a larger one than we at first supposed. At first the snake 

 braced the coils so that we could not stir it but finally the strain 

 on its neck became so great that it relaxed its coils and with a 

 rush it was hauled out into the bed of the brook. It was not 

 at all active, so, after admiring it for a few minutes, we killed it 

 by a knife thrust into the heart. It measured 22 feet and 8 inches 

 by 22 inches in greatest circumference.. In the log we found a 

 mass of 89 eggs which the animal had been covering. 



It took us the rest of the day to skin it, but by dark we had 

 the skin at the house. The next day we returned and cleaned 



