3850 Notices of New Books, 



first was captured by ray brother, a few years ago, to add to a collection of live snakes 

 which we kept in a cask and tried to tame. This specimen exceeded 4 feet in length 

 by an inch or two, but I cannot distinctly remember by how many inches. On being 

 caught, it struck my brother's hand, and inflicted a wound which bled freely. This is 

 the only case in which I have seen the bite of the common snake bring blood ; and 

 this snake, though we tried him, never struck again with the same force. The second 

 instance of a large snake was a recently killed one, which I found the year before last 

 while out butterfly-catching. This snake, from its size, I was induced to measure on 

 the handle of my butterfly-net, and found that it must have been about 4 feet 1 inch 

 long. Doubtless snakes of this large size are of very rare occurrence. The largest 

 viper I remember to have measured was exactly 2 feet 1 inch in length. — William 

 Henry Hawher ; Ashford Lodge., near Petersfield, Hants, March 15, 1853. 



NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 



' A Naturalises Sojourn in Jamaica.'' By Philip Henry Gosse, 

 A.L.S., &c; assisted by Richard Hill, Esq. London: Long- 

 mans. 1853. 



" Natural History is far too much a science of dead things ; a 

 necrology. It is mainly conversant with dry skins furred or feathered, 

 blackened, shrivelled, and hay-stuffed; with objects, some admirably 

 beautiful, some hideously ugly, impaled on pins, and arranged in rows 

 in cork drawers ; with uncouth forms, disgusting to sight and smell, 

 bleached and shrunken, suspended by threads and immersed in spirit 

 (in defiance of the aphorism, that i he who is born to be hanged will 

 never be drowned ') in glass bottles. These distorted things are de- 

 scribed; their scales, plates, feathers counted; their forms copied, all 

 shrivelled and stiffened as they are ; their colours, changed and modi- 

 fied by death or partial decay, carefully set down; their limbs, mem- 

 bers, and organs measured, and the results recorded in thousandths of 

 an inch ; two names are given to every one ; the whole is enveloped 

 in a mystic cloud of Grraeco- Latino-English phraseology (often barba- 

 ric enough), — and this is Natural History ! Of the hundred thousand 

 animals which are considered as 'known to naturalists,' it is probably 

 much within the mark to assert that ninety thousand are 'known' only 

 in such sort as is described above. What should we think if the 

 world were to collect from Egypt the tens of thousands of mummies 

 that are said to be entombed in the mighty catacombs of that coun- 

 try, and having placed them in museums should appoint learned men 

 minutely to measure their differing features and limbs, to describe 



