140 SNAKES 



Piccadilly Circus by tube and, leaving my train, 

 wander about in the galleries in search of the right 

 station for some other part of London, I cease to 

 know the points of the compass. But for the lettering 

 on the walls and the arrow-heads and pointing fingers 

 I am as effectually lost as if I had fallen into a 

 deep hole and had, at the end of it, crawled out 

 at the Antipodes. 



Judging from myself (a very bad case I dare say), 

 the sense of direction is a dwindling one in our 

 civilised state, and in many of us appears to be 

 wholly gone. Yet to man living in a state of nature 

 it is of vital importance, as it is to all animals en- 

 dowed with locomotive organs — wings, fins, legs and, 

 in the ophidians, ribs and scales. The snake does 

 not, as Tautus taught us, move by means of its 

 fiery spirit. And we know that snakes, with prac- 

 tically no horizon at aU and so short-sighted that 

 they can have no landmarks, do yet possess the sense 

 of direction in a remarkable degree. Thus, there are 

 authentic cases on record of tame snakes travelling 

 long distances back to the home from which they had 

 been removed — incidents similar to those we are 

 accustomed to hear every day with regard to our 

 domestic animals and pets. Apart from such cases, 

 we see from observation of their habits that the 

 snake could not do very well without such a sense. 

 Thus, take the snakes that inhabit great grass 

 countries like the prairies, or, better still, the abso- 

 lutely flat pampas, where the snake, moving on its 

 belly, is down in the grass and seldom has its head 



