%°) 
THE - BIS COBRA. 
possibly by a diseased condition of the heart. I believe that nothing is more 
certain than that grossly ignorant and superstitious subjects, bitten by harmless 
snakes and even by lizards, do occasionally die from pure fright. Many doctors, 
I fancy, could quote instances in support of this statement from their own 
experience. 
Here are two cases recorded by Dr. Russell, the pioneer of ophiology in Tndia, 
from which those interested in the question may draw their own conclusions. 
Case No. 1.—‘ Two sepoys at Rajamundri were bitten in the same night by the 
same snake, which was described as being ‘scarcely six inches long, about the 
size of a large goose quill, of a dark straw colour, a flat head, with two very small 
eyes, which shone like diamonds, and behind each eye was a black streak about 
three-fourths of an inch long.’ The first man bitten died after six hours. He 
said and felt that death was inevitable directly he was bitten. The second man 
bitten within a minute of the first, died within eleven hours. Neither man, it 
appears, suffered visible pain or convulsions, but passed away in a kind of stupor.” 
Case No. 2.—‘The porter of Mr. Bourchier, Governor of Bombay, a very stout 
Arab, was bitten by a very small serpent, and died almost instantaneously after 
exclaiming that a snake had bit him.” The italics are mine. Dr. Russell’s 
information was got from the Governor’s son, Mr. James Bourchier, who spoke 
from memory, and added ‘that the snake to which the man’s death was imputed 
was by the Portuguese called cobra de morte; that in the course of twenty years 
he had only seen two of them, one on the island of Bombay, the other in his 
own house at St Thomas’s Mount, near Madras; that the length of the snake was 
from six to nine inches; its thickness that of a common tobacco pipe; the head 
black with white marks, bearing some resemblance to a skull and two cross bones ; 
the body alternately black and white, in joints the whole length; and that its 
venom is of all others the most pernicious.” 
Dr. Russell, it must be admitted, has not suggested that the death of the two 
Sepoys, and the very stout Arab, evidently stouter in body than heart, was due to 
fright. He made no comments, and possibly believed that the snakes described 
were as deadly as they were said to be. Very little was known in those days on 
the subject of venomous snakes. Local superstitions were too deeply rooted to be 
shaken by the little exact knowledge then available. The diminutive cobra de 
morte was then a living tradition, and its existence not to be rashly questioned. 
But ean any one now believe that the diminutive snakes deseribed, even if imma- 
ture specimens of venomous species, were capable of causing the death, by their 
potson alone, of the two sepoys andthestout Arab? From the descriptions given 
it is impossible to say what the snakes in question really were. But they are 
certainly more likely to have been harmless than venomous species, and the 
description of Mr. Bouchier’s snake, to whose bite the stout Arab succumbed 
“almost instantaneously,” reads uncommonly like that of the familiar and innocent 
little Zycodon aulicus. This theory of death by fright is not a new one. In com- 
menting on the same cases, in a chapter on the snakes of the Poona district, con- 
tributed to the Bombay Gazetteer some years ago, I ventured the same explanation 
of the cause of death, observing that the “cobra de morte, like the mythical bis- 
cobra or poisonous lizard, has no real existence ; bub whereas the latter name is still 
