SALIVA OF THE GILA MONSTER. 219 
Monster is unable to inflict a wound at all. Even if the teeth are in working order the 
chances of the poison finding its way into the wound are very few, for the teeth are not 
directly connected with the poison glands, and the latter are below the fangs instead of 
above as in poisonous snakes. The poison simply flows out onto the gums below the 
teeth, and, to be effective, has to be forced wp into the wound. Unless the flow of saliva 
be abundant and the teeth all present and forced into the bitten flesh so deeply as to 
press it down upon the poison ducts where they open between the lip and the gum, it is 
difficult to see how even the smallest quantity of poison could enter the wound, eyen 
though the teeth are grooved to afford it a passage. The strange thing, then, is not that 
bitten animals should sometimes survive, but that they should sometimes die. 
Nevertheless, small animals often do die from the bite of this, the only poisonous 
lizard, and we must believe that a yenom which can kill a pigeon in seven minutes and a 
rabbit in less than two might easily under favorable circumstances cause a wound to 
prove fatal even to man—a belief which is rendered far from improbable by the extra- 
ordinary virulence of the poison and the lizard’s habit of holding like a bulldog to what- 
ever it bites. 
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1878. Bocourt, F.—Mission Scientifique au Mexique et dans 1’Amerique Centrale, III, Reptiles, 5e livr., pp. 296-— 
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1880. SumicuRast, F.—Bulletin de la Société Zoologique de France, p. 178. 
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