
THE LAKES OF IOWA,—PAST AND PRESENT. 143 
young ones should be made in order to be sure that the 
young were really in the alimentary canal and not in the 
oviduets. It is also of importance to ascertain if young 
snakes, after having been swallowed by the parent, ever 
enter the stomach or are confined to the space in the cesoph- 
agus above it. This can be discovered by cutting open the 
throat and following down to the stomach, which in most 
species is situated from about one third to one half the dis- 
tance between the mouth and the termination of the alimen- 
tary canal, and can readily be determined by its thicker 
walls and more numerous folds on its inside, which are very 
marked when the stomach is not distended with food. 

THE LAKES OF IO0WA,—PAST AND PRESENT. 
BY C. A. WHITE, M. D. 

Laxes of Iowa! reiterates some New England reader, and, 
seeing no large bodies of water represented on the map of 
that Commonwealth, he really thinks ponds must be meant. 
Well, be it so, but the writer hereof is a western man, and 
in the West all collections of fresh water, whether large or 
small, are called lakes or lakelets. Perhaps, however, he has 
eard the stories of the “walled lakes” of Iowa, in which the 
wondrous handiwork of a departed race of men is described, 
consisting of walls of huge stones encircling the lakes like 
t of an artificial fish-pond, so raised as to prevent an 
overflow of water upon the adjacent low ground; sloping 
down to the water’s edge with a pavement like a Mississippi 
levee ; rounded and graded with earth upon the top, forming 
à good road upon which the Jehus of that departed race 
doubtless drove their elk or buffalo chariots in pursuit of 
Pleasure or of their daily avocations; and the whole finished 
with a garniture of sage reflections upon the mutability of 

