10 THE START [chap, i 



snakes and the vipers. Most of the colubrine snakes 

 are entirely harmless, and are the common snakes that 

 we meet everjnvhere. But some of them — the cobras, 

 for instance— 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 have small teeth which cannot pene- 

 trate even ordinary clothing. They are only dangerous 

 if actually trodden on by someone with bare feet, or if 

 seized in the hand. There are harmless snakes very 

 like them in colour, which are sometimes kept as pets ; 

 but it behoves 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 

 division of the widely spread family of vipers which is 

 known as the pit-vipers. In South America these in- 

 clude two distinct subfamihes or genera — whether they 

 are called famihes, subfamilies, or genera would de- 

 pend, I suppose, largely upon the varying personal 

 views of the individual describer on the subject of 

 herpetological nomenclature. One genus includes the 

 rattlesnakes, of which the big Brazihan species is as 

 dangerous as those of the southern United States. But 

 the large majority of the species and individuals of 

 dangerous snakes in tropical America are included in 

 the genus lachesis. These are active, vicious, aggres- 

 sive snakes without rattles. They are exceedingly 

 poisonous. Some of them grow to a very large size, 

 being, indeed, among the largest poisonous snakes in 



