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 Water, 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 



