NOTES ON WILD DOGS, .fee. rAl 



premolars, cut the tongue badly, raked the palate, and gone down the 

 throat somewhere. It was a case of '' first come first served/' and 

 fortunately my little express was too quick for her ; but I hope never 

 to have to seek the bubble reputation quite so literally in the tiger's 

 mouth again. It was too close a thing to be altogether pleasant. 



While tracking this wouudedtigress we came on afemalefour-horued 

 deer that she had killed and nearly devoured that morning ; and 

 this leads nie to say that Mr. Blanford has united the two varieties ot 

 four-horned-deer — those with long anterior horns and those with 

 shoi't — into one species. I have shot about thirty of these little deer at 

 various times (I got four last month), and T have never succeeded in 

 getting a head in which the anterior horns reached half an inch in 

 length. I have shot them in the Gir Forest and in the jungles of 

 Guzerat and the Panch Mahals generally from the Tapti nearly up to 

 Edur. In this part of India, so far as I know, the anterior horns 

 are invariably very small, mere wart-like excrescences in fact, 

 and I mention this point to invite members of the Society to 

 record the measurements of horns of four-horned deer shot by them, 

 with localities, so as to ascertain, if possible, the distribution of the 

 two vai'ieties. A friend at Baroda has now a young- male four- 

 horned deer alive. Its posterior horns have grown three-quarters of 

 an inch long, but no trace of the anterior horns can yet be felt. 

 This deer came from near Godra. I have taken up so much of your 

 time that I will now conclude after briefly mentioning a curious bit 

 of snake-lore that I heard last May. When descending a hill one 

 evening, a large black cobra sprang up about two feet from me, 

 spread his hood in a threatening way, and then glided off, stopping 

 twice and rising with hood outspread. I cut him nearly in half with 

 a rifle bullet. When the men came up and I told them to stretch him 

 out to measure him — he was five feet eight inches exactly — one of 

 them pointed to his tail, which was blunt and whitish, as if the end 

 scales had come ofi", and another said to me : " That cobra has bitten 

 some man. The end of the tail always drops off when he bites any 

 one." All the men seemed to be quite familiar with this curious belief. 

 It may be new to some of the members present, as it was to me. 



In the Asianiov June 17th, Mr. H. B. Riddell mentions a similar 

 superstition about a supposed poisonous lizard. 



