REPTILES IN CAPTIVITY 189 
years ago at Neuer Pferdemarkt, when an Indian python, only 
fourteen feet long, swallowed four lambs within twenty-four 
hours, each weighing from twelve to nineteen pounds and 
possessing horns several inches long. After this performance 
the snake was so swollen by the gas evolved in its interior 
by the semi-digested lambs that it burst open for a length of 
about a foot, the two edges yawning apart to a width of a 
couple of inches. This meal took about ten days to digest, 
and on the eleventh day the snake took another lamb. The 
woollen parts were thrown out in compact balls; whilst the 
horns and hoofs passed through the snake’s body unchanged. 
Ten days is a comparatively brief period for the digestion 
of its food by a snake. I remember the case of a giant 
serpent which had eaten a hog ; the signs of digestion actually 
did not commence for four weeks and were not completed 
until ten weeks later. That pigs are found by snakes rather 
hard to digest I have other evidence. Some time ago two 
very large Borneo snakes arrived at my garden, having ac- 
complished safely a long voyage direct from Singapore. 
One of them was twenty-five feet long and weighed 248 lbs. 
I concluded from their savageness that they had not been in 
captivity very long, and in this belief I was justified a week 
later by finding among their excrement the tusks and hoofs 
of a wild boar. This must have been food which they had 
caught when still in a state of freedom. 
Correlated with the capacity for consuming enormous 
quantities of food is the capacity for going for long periods 
without any food at all. In the wild state it must often 
happen that snakes for many weeks together are unable to 
catch any prey that is suitable to them, and hence it is neces- 
sary for their preservation that when they do catch food they 
shall be able to consume it in large quantities. Animals in 
captivity, which have taken their food regularly week by 
week, will suddenly cease to take it and fast for more than 
six months. In the Zoological Gardens at Amsterdam the 
former director, Dr. Westermann, who has now been dead 
