128 DIVISION I. VERTEBRAL ANIMALS. —CLASS III. REPTILIA. 
this animal do not open as ours, in the manner of a pair of hinges, where 
bones are applied to bones, and play upon one another; on the contrary, 
the Serpents jaws are held together at the roots by a stretching, muscular 
skin; by which means they open as widely as the animal chooses to stretch 
them, and admit of a prey much thicker than the snake’s own body. The 
throat, like stretching leather, dilates to admit the morsel; the stomach 
receives it in part, and the rest remains in the gullet till putrefaction and 
the juices of the Serpent’s body unite to dissolve it. 
The tongue in all these animals is long and forky. It is composed of two 
long, fleshy substances, which terminate in sharp points, and are very plia- 
ble. Some of the viper kind have tongues a fifth part the length of their 
bodies ; they are continually darting them out, but they are entirely harm- 
less, and only terrify those who are ignorant of the real situation of their 
poison. 
The skin is composed of a number of scales, united to each other by a 
transparent membrane, which grows harder as it grows older, until the ani- 
mal changes it, which is generally done twice a year. This cover then 
bursts near the head, and the Serpents creep from it, by an undulatory mo- 
tion, in a new skin much more vivid than the former. As the edges of the 
foremost scales lie over the ends of the following scales, so those edges, 
when the scales are erected, which the animal has the power of doing in a 
small deeree, catch in the ground, like the nails in the wheels of a chariot, 
and so promote and facilitate the animal’s progressive motion. The erect- 
ing these scales is by means of a multitude of distinct muscles, with which 
sach is supplied, and one end of which is tacked to the foregoing. 
This tribe of animals, like that of fishes, seems to have no bounds put to 
its growth; their bones are in a great measure cartilaginous, and they are 
consequently capable of great extension; the older, therefore, a Serpent 
becomes, the larger it grows; and, as they seem to live to a great age, they 
wrive at an enormous size. 
Lequat assures us that he saw a Serpent in Java that was fifty feet long, 
and Carli mentions their growing to above forty feet. Mr. Wentworth, who 
had large concerns in South America, assures us that, in that country, 
they grow to an enormous length. He one day sent out a soldier, with an 
Indian, to kill a wild fowl for the table; and they accordingly went some 
miles from the fort. In pursuing their game, the Indian, who generally 
marched before, beginning to tire, went to rest himself upon the fallen trunk 
of a tree, as he supposed it to be; but when he was just going to sit down, 
the enormous monster began to move, and the poor savage, perceiving that 
he had approached a liboya, the greatest of all the Serpent kind, dropped 
down in an agony. The soldier, who perceived at some distance what had 
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