REPTILIA—BOA CONSTRICTOR. 701 
days together, and digest their meal in safety. The smallest effort will then 
destroy them; they scarcely can make any resistance; and, equally un- 
qualified for flight or opposition, even the naked Indians do not fear to assail 
them. But it is otherwise, when this sleeping interval of digestion is over; 
they then issue, with famished appetites, from their retreats, and with 
accumulated terrors, while every animal of the forest flies from their 
presence. One of them has been known to kill and devour a buffalo. 
Having darted upon the affrighted beast, (says the narrator,) the serpent 
instantly began to wrap him round with its volumimous twistings; and at 
every twist the bones of the buffalo were heard to crack as loud as the report 
of a gun. It was in vain that the animal struggled and bellowed; its 
enormous enemy entwined it so closely, that at length all its bones were 
crushed to pieces, like those of a malefactor on the wheel, and the whole 

body was reduced to one uniform mass; the serpent then untwined its 
folds, in order to swallow its prey at leisure. To prepare for this, and also 
to make it slip down the throat more smoothly, it was seen to lick «he 
whole body over, and thus to cover it with a mucilaginous substance. It 
then began to swallow it, at the end that offered the least resistance; and 
in the act of swallowing, the throat suffered so great a dilatation, that it 
took in at once a substance that was thrice its own thickness. 
This animal inhabits India, Africa, and South America. With respect to 
their conformation, all serpents have a very wide mouth, in proportion to 
the size of the head; and, what is very extraordinary, they can gape and 
swallow the head of another animal which is three times as big as their 
own. To explain this, it must be observed, that the jaws of 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 serpent’s 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 lea- 
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