10 THROUGH THE BRAZILIAN WILDERNESS 



some bottles of the anti-venom serum, for on such an ex- 

 pedition there is always a certain danger from snakes. 

 On one of his trips Cherrie had lost a native follower by 

 snake-bite. The man was bitten while out alone in the 

 forest, and, although he reached camp, the poison was al- 

 ready working in him, so that he could give no intelligible 

 account of what had occurred, and he died in a short time. 



Poisonous snakes are of several different families, but 

 the most poisonous ones, those which are dangerous to 

 man, belong to the two great families of the colubrine 

 snakes and the vipers. Most of the colubrine snakes are 

 entirely harmless, and are the common snakes that we 

 meet everywhere. But some of them, the cobras for in- 

 stance, develop into what are on the whole perhaps the 

 most formidable of all snakes. The only poisonous colu- 

 brine snakes in the New World are the ring-snakes, the 

 coral-snakes of the genus elaps, which are found from 

 the extreme southern United States southward to the Ar- 

 gentine. These coral-snakes are not vicious and have 

 small teeth which cannot penetrate even ordinary clothing. 

 They are only dangerous if actually trodden on by some 

 one with bare feet or if seized in the hand. There are 

 harmless snakes very like them in color which are some- 

 times kept as pets; but it behooves every man who keeps 

 such a pet or who handles such a snake to be very sure 

 as to the genus to which it belongs. 



The great bulk of the poisonous snakes of America, 

 including all the really dangerous ones, belong to a divi- 

 sion of the widely spread family of vipers which is known 

 as the pit-vipers. In South America these include two 

 distinct subfamilies or genera — whether they are called 



