lo Through the Brazilian Wilderness 



of possible importance to us because of the trip we were 

 about to take. South America, even more than Australia 

 and Africa, and almost as much as India, is a country 

 of poisonous snakes. As in India, although not to the 

 same degree, these snakes are responsible for a very 

 serious mortality among human beings. One of the most 

 interesting evidences of the modern advance in Brazil is 

 the establishment near Sao Paulo of an institution espe- 

 cially for the study of these poisonous snakes, so as to 

 secure antidotes to the poison and to develop enemies 

 to the siiakes themselves. We wished to take into the 

 interior with us some bottles of the anti-venom serum, 

 for on such an expedition 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 already 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 

 colubrine 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 Argentine. These coral-snakes are not vicious and 



