122 THE VAST. 



even an ox, he cannot, according to Tschudi, raise even a 

 sheep from the ground. " He cannot, when flying, carry 

 a weight exceeding eight or ten pounds." The voracity 

 of the obscene bird is very great. The owner of some 

 captive specimens assured the naturalist that he had 

 given to one, in the course of a single day, by way of 

 experiment, eighteen pounds of meat, consisting of the 

 entrails of oxen ; that the bird devoured the whole, 

 and ate his allowance the next day with the usual ap- 

 petite. 



We have all been accustomed from childhood to regard 

 with awe the enormous serpents of the hot and damp 

 intertropical forests ; though the specimens carried about 

 in travelling menageries have but little contributed to 

 nurture the sentiment. A couple of coils of variegated 

 mosaic, looking like a tesselated pavement, about as 

 thick as a lacquey's calf, wrapped up in the folds of a 

 blanket at the bottom of a deal box, we had difficulty in 

 accepting as the impersonation of the demon which hung 

 from the branches of an Indian tree, and, having pressed 

 the life out of a buffalo in his mighty folds and broken 

 his bones, swallowed the body entire, all but tlie horns. 

 Here again there is incertitude and disappointment ; and 

 the colossal dragon, which looms so large in the distance 

 of time and space, grows " small by degrees and beauti- 

 fully less " in the ratio of its approach to our own times 

 and our own eyes. Yet enough of size and power re- 

 mains, even when all legitimate deductions are made, to 

 invest the great boa with a romantic interest, and to 



