HINTS TO ADDER-SEEKERS 21 
a distinct loss. Fontana dissected 40,000 adders in 
his long and busy day, but if there is anything we 
want to know about the adder beyond the number 
of scales on the integument, and the number, 
shape, and size of the bones in the dead coil, he 
and the innumerable ophiologists and herpetologists 
who came after him are unable to tell us. We can 
read about the scales and bones in a thousand 
books. We want to know more about the living 
thing, even about its common life habits. It has 
not yet been settled whether or not the female 
adder swallows its young, not, like the fer-de-lance, 
to digest them in her stomach, but to save their 
threatened lives. It is true that many persons 
have, during the last half century, witnessed the 
thing and have described what they saw in The 
Zoologist, Land and W ater, Field and other journals; 
nevertheless the compilers of our Natural Histories 
regard the case as not yet proved beyond a doubt. 
Here, then, we have one of several questions 
which can only be answered by field-naturalists 
who abstain from killing. But a better reason for 
not killing may be given than this desire to discover 
a new fact—the mere satisfying of a mental curiosity. 
I know good naturalists who have come to hate 
the very sight of a gun, simply, because that useful 
instrument has become associated in their case with 
the thought and the memory of the degrading or 
disturbing effect on the mind of killing the creatures 
we love, whose secrets we wish to find out. 
Alas! it took me a long time to discover the 
