ORDER OPHIDIA. 295 



will suffice them for many weeks ; and it is reported that 

 both adders and vipers have been kept for more than 

 six months without any aliment whatever, and without losing 

 a particle of their energy and activity. Notwithstanding this, 

 when they find the opportunity, they will swallow at a time 

 an enormous mass of food. It is very common to see the 

 collared adder swallow toads and frogs whose body is of con- 

 siderably greater diameter than its own, and also mice, rats, 

 and field-mice. 



In the Dutch colonies of the East Indies, Andre Cleyer 

 purchased of the hunters of the country an enormous serpent, 

 in the body of which he found a deer of middle age, alto- 

 gether entire with its skin and limbs. In another individual 

 of the same species also examined by this traveller, a wild 

 he-goat was found, with its horns, and a third had evidently 

 swallowed a porcupine with its quills. He adds that a preg- 

 nant woman also became the prey of a reptile of the same 

 genus in the island of Amboyna, and that this kind is some- 

 times kept for the purpose of attacking the buffaloes in the 

 kingdom of Aracan on the frontiers of Bengal. We need 

 hardly be astonished at this, when Prince Maurice of Nassau- 

 Siegen, one of the governors of Brazil, in the seventeenth 

 century, assures us that he himself was an eye-witness of stags, 

 and other equally voluminous mammifera, and even of a Dutch 

 woman, being devoured in this manner in that region of South 

 America where he commanded. Father Gumilla, in his history 

 of the Orinoco, recounts analogous facts concerning an ophidian 

 which he calls hajo, and a multitude of others of the same 

 kind, may be read in the works of travellers and naturalists, 

 who also inform us that serpents have been seen to employ 

 many days in swallowing a large prey. So that the part which 

 had got into the stomach was already digested before the rest 

 was entered upon. 



We shall soon see sufficient reasons to explain such asto- 



