APPENDIX. 587 



them off, he felt a scratch and complained of it, when the widowed 

 sister, being present, recollected that the same pain had been felt by 

 her husband on the like occasion ; the youth went to bed, suffered 

 and died in the same way that his father and brother had before him. 

 These repeated and singular deaths being reported in the country, a 

 medical gentleman called upon the friends of the deceased to inquire 

 into the particulars, and at once pronounced their deaths to have 

 been occasioned by venom. The boots that had been the cause of 

 complaint were brought to him, when he cut one of them open with 

 care, and discovered the extreme point of the fang of a rattlesnake 

 issuing from the leather, and assured the people that this had done 

 all the mischief. To prove this satisfactorily, he scratched with it 

 the nose of a dog, and the dog died in a few hours from the poisonous 

 effect it was still able to convey." 



Pray, sir, where were your brains (whither had they fled ? Cer- 

 tainly not to Walton Hall) when you received, and approved of, a 

 narrative at once so preposterous and so palpably fictitious ? I have 

 too high an opinion of your well-known integrity, even to suspect for 

 one moment that you inserted it in your journal with the most dis- 

 tant intention of misleading your readers. I attribute the rash deed 

 solely and wholly to your ignorance, ignorance quite unparalleled 

 and unpardonable in REGIUS PROFESSOR OF NATURAL HISTORY. If I 

 am rightly informed, sir, you are proprietor of a Museum, wherefore 

 you must have had much more frequent and much better opportu- 

 nities of improving yourself in zoology than generally fall to the lot 

 of other scientific gentlemen. Has then the dignity of the regius 

 professorship lulled you into such a fatal security that you have never 

 once thought it necessary to examine the point of a serpent's fang ? 

 which had you done, you never would have admitted Audubon's ac- 

 count of the rattlesnake into your journal ; and thus you would have 

 avoided that which, when this letter appears, must fill your friends with 

 pity and your admirers with regret. Audubon expressly states that 

 it was the extreme point of the fang which had done all the mischief; 

 and in order to prove the correctness of his " curious but well authen- 

 ticated (mind that, sir) series of facts," he introduces, to his everlast- 

 ing confusion, a medical gentleman, who most opportunely discovered 

 the extreme point of a rattlesnake's fang sticking in the boot which he 



