CEEASTES COENUTUS. 333 
he mentions that he kept two in a glass jar, such as is used for sweetmeats, for 
two years without giving them any food. When disturbed, it attacks with great 
energy, throwing itself forward by a bound for some distance. At first it rasps its coils 
one against the other, producing the sound characteristic of itself and Echis, and 
when the irritation passes endurance the viper suddenly, by the rapid straightening of 
its body, launches itself forwards. I have stood with a crowd of Arabs around one of 
these vipers (all, however, at a respectful distance from it), and angered it with a lono- 
switch I carried with me to stun snakes, when it would spring forwards and scatter the 
crowd in every direction. Prosper Alpinus's account of the snake described by him 
under the name Acontia or Jaculmn recalls the horned viper. He says it was so called 
Jaculum because it darted like a spear and was very deadly, a description in no way 
applicable to the mild snake Eryx, to which Hasselquist, having mistaken it for 
Cerastes, applied the term Jaculus. 
Little is known regarding the action or potency of the poison of this snake, or that 
of its fellow 61 vipera. Bruce records a case of a snake-catcher bitten between the first 
finger and the thumb by a Cerastes cornutus that had sprung a distance of three feet 
and fastened itself on the man's hand. The man so far from dying did not appear to 
suffer in any way from the bite, neither did he take any precautions against its effects. 
He was fully four hours under Bruce's observation ; and as he escaped any evil effects 
of the bite, are we to suppose that he had been immunized 1 The very snake 
that bit him was made by Bruce to bite a pelican in the thigh, and it died in 
thirteen minutes. He also relates that he saw a man at Cairo take hold of a Cerastes 
cornutus by the neck, that had previously killed a fowl, and beginning at its tail eat it just 
as one would eat a carrot or a stalk of celery. Drummond-Hay gives an almost similar 
account of a snake-eating performance he witnessed in Barbary, in which the man was 
bitten in the hands and neck by the poisonous snake he was devouring. Such cases as 
these merit recollection in view of the facts that have been recently adduced regarding 
the immunization of animals to snake-venom. 
The poison seems to be destructive to small mammals and to birds even as large as a 
pelican, but that it is deadly to man remains yet to be ascertained, and the same may 
be said of the poison of the little C. vipera. Berthoud 1 found that its bite was less 
dangerous than that of Vipera lebetina. 
t* SSt*J> ■£' c^ -fi* otf^ 
Dr. Walter Innes informs me that the horned viper is known as ^jJUIj i** ,1 s^ <us- 
=haiya hurra or haiya bikurim=homed snake. I have also heard it called h^. £^ 
=haiya geheli=snake of desert. Sir J. G. Wilkinson speaks of the hornless" Cerastes 
cornutus as dashdsh, possibly the same word as bwschasch of Forskal. 
1 Eev. Zool. 1848, p. 74. 
