150 Journal of the Mitchell Society. [Dec. 



randi is exactly the same, except that the snake has to get the 

 eg-g in a position where he can push his mouth over it without 

 it rolling away, in the corner of a box for instance. The egg so 

 far as I can make out passes into the snake's stomach whole and 

 unbroken and the shell being dissolved by the digestive fluids, 

 its contents are released and digested. 



Those harmless snakes which have but little constricting 

 power, such as the various species of Water Snake, the Garter 

 Snakes, Green Snake, and Spreading Adder.simply catch their 

 prey and swallow it alive and whole without further dallying. 

 The Snakes of the genera Ophibolus (Lampropeltis,) Pityo- 

 phis, Coluber (Callopeltis,) Bascanion and Spilotes, commonly 

 known as King Snakes, Bull Snakes, Chicken Snakes, Black 

 Snakes, Coach whips, and Gopher Snakes have however very 

 considerable constricting power as may be easily proved by al- 

 lowing a good sized specimen of any of these genera to coil it- 

 self round ones wrist, but to what extent they habitually kill 

 their prey by this means I do not know. The common black 

 King Snake with white rings whose food consists of rats, mice 

 and other snakes kills the latter in its coils before swallowing 

 them, but how it treats the former I do not know. On one oc- 

 casion I had placed a King- Snake, possibly some 18 inches or 2 

 feet long in a box with a number of other snakes all consider- 

 ably larger than itself, almost immediately it glided up to a 

 large Black Snake and seizing it by the head wrapped itself in 

 a tight spiral coil round the forepart of the latters body. The 

 Black snake however thrashed about so violently that the King 

 had to let go,aud when the latter again attempted to seize him 

 the Black Snake struck him on the head which cooled off his 

 ardor and there was no further trouble between them. On an- 

 other occasion I placed a large King Snake in a box with a 

 smaller Black Snake, and the former seized the latter by the 

 head and crushed the life out of him in his coils, but releasing 

 the Black Snake's body little by little as he swallowed it. 

 I once saw a Chicken Snake, I think it was the striped southern 

 Species Coluber quadrhittatus. kill a young fledgling bird 



