HORNED SNAKE. 579 



brane, it eats in perfect safety ; for the tooth cannot press the bag 

 of poison at the root while it lies in this position, nor can it rise in 

 the tube to spill itself, nor can the tooth make any wound, so as 

 to receive it ; but the animal is supposed to eat but seldom, or 

 only when it is with young. This viper has only one row of teeth ; 

 none but the canine are noxious. The poison is very copious for 

 so small a creature, it is fully as large as a drop of laudanum dropt 

 from a vial by a careful hand. Viewed through a glass, it appears 

 not perfectly transparent or pellucid. I should imagine it hath 

 other reservoirs than the bag under the tooth, for I compelled it 

 to scratch eighteen pigeons upon the thigh as quickly as possible, 

 and they all died nearly in the same interval of time ; but I con- 

 fess the danger attending the dissection of the head of this creature 

 made me so cautious, that any observation I should make upon 

 these parts would be less to be depended upon. 



" People have doubted whether or not this yellow liquor is the 

 poison, and the reason has been, that animals who had tasted it, 

 did not die as when bitten, but this reason does not hold good in 

 modern physics. We know why the saliva of a mad dog has been 

 given to animals, and has not affected them ; and a German phy- 

 sician was bold enough to distil the pus or putrid matter flowing 

 from the ulcer of a person infected by the plague, and taste it af- 

 terwards, without bad consequences ; so that it is clear the poison 

 has no activity till through some sore or wound it is admitted into 

 the circulation. Again, the tooth itself, divested of that poison, 

 has as little effect. The viper deprived of his canine teeth, an 

 operation very easily performed, bites, without any fatal conse- 

 quence, with the others; and many instances there have been of mad 

 dogs having bit people cloathed in coarse woollen stuff, which had 

 so far cleaned the teeth of the saliva in passing through it, as not 

 to have left the smallest inflammation after the wound. 



" The cerastes is mentioned by name in Lucan, and without 

 warranting the separate existence of any of the rest, I can see 

 several that are but the cerastes under another term : the theba- 

 nus ophites, the ammodytes, the torrida dipsas, and the prester, 

 all of them are but this viper, described from the form of its parts 

 or colours*. Cato must have been marching in the night when he 

 met this army of serpents : the cerastes hides itself all day in holes 

 in the sand, where it lives in contiguous and similar houses to those 



. - i , 



* Luc, lib. 9, 

 2 P2 



