CONCERNING SERPENTS. 275 



tive, and we have seen them when very young display the instinctive 

 habits of their species. 



The python coils around her eggs, and faithfully remains there 

 during their two months of incubation ; the temperature of her body 

 rising, in one instance, to 96° Fahr. All this time she refuses food, 

 " but appears feverish, and drinks water freely." 



The time when serpents first appeared upon the globe is compara- 

 tively recent. No fossil remains of them have yet been discovered, 

 until after the close of the Age of Reptiles. The oldest yet found 

 were in the Eocene of the south of England. Prof. E. D. Cope first 

 found them in the United States in the Eocene of New Jersey. 

 They have been found also by Prof. Marsh in the Eocene of Wyo- 

 ming. Prof. Cope discovered five new species during the past sum- 

 mer in the Miocene of Colorado, and has also obtained them from 

 Post-Pliocene formations. So it appears that, during the whole of the 

 Tertiary, serpents abounded, and the fact that in the Eocene they 

 were so widely distributed suggests a much earlier origin for this 

 order of reptiles. How numerous they may have been during periods 

 subsequent to their advent is not easily determined. But, notwith- 

 standing their abundance in the tropics, and in contiguous regions, it 

 is probable that their period of greatest abundance, if not of greatest 

 development, has passed. Civilization destroys them, or drives them 

 to the swamps, the mountains, and the wilderness. 



The number of species of snakes found in the State of New York is 

 seventeen. Two of these are venomous, the rattlesnake and the viper. 

 Sixteen species are named in Prof. Cook's catalogue for New Jersey, 

 and that gentleman remarks : " All of them are of great value to the 

 agriculturist, and the popular prejudice against them should be done 

 away with." It should be more widely known and more often con- 

 sidered that snakes destroy immense numbers of animals which are 

 detrimental to the interests of man, as rats, mice, insects, larvae, and 

 worms of various kinds. The fer de lance infests the sugar-plantations 

 of some of the West India islands, not to destroy men, who fear it, but 

 to obtain rats for food, which swarm there in incredible numbers. 

 In the State of Maine are ten species of snakes, in Michigan fifteen 

 species, and from Baird and Girard's catalogue, published in 1853, we 

 learn that 119 species of North American serpents were at that time 

 known and described. 



In the older settled portions of the United States their numbers 

 have diminished, and in the more thoroughly cultivated sections of 

 New England, New York, New Jersey, and perhaps other States, 

 their scarcity is a matter of common observation. Before persistent 

 warfare, and amid conditions which are becoming more unfavorable to 

 their habits of life, they will doubtless become fewer in number and 

 species, and, in such regions, the period of their extinction may not be 

 very remote. 



