160 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 



NOTE FF. 



I have made the number of serpents much too great. I do not believe there are 

 twenty species in the whole United States. 



Rattlesnakes are of two kinds : one considerably larger than the other. This serpent 

 is never seen farther north than the mountains which surround Crown Point, in that 

 direction. Henry saw one, two degrees farther north, to the northwest of French river, 

 which discharges itself into Lake Huron. This circumstance was considered a very 

 extraordinary one, and it greatly alarmed the superstitious fears of the Indians. It is not 

 true that the hog is invulnerable to the attacks of the rattlesnake. He fights it as he 

 would any other animal, and, if wounded, invariably falls a victim. In Lowthorp's 

 Abridgment of the Transactions of the Royal Society, (vol. 3.) a story is told of a 

 rattlesnake, in Virginia, which had got into a place where there were pigs ; two dogs 

 were set upon the snake, and were mortally wounded ; " the howling of the dogs gave 

 notice to the sow, and made her come furiously bristling, and she run immediately into 

 her den ; but being likewise bit by the snake, she set up a terrible squeak, and run also 

 into the river, and there died." 



Dr. Barton says, (in opposition to the vulgar opinion,) that the crepitaculum does not 

 give any certain indication of the reptile's age; for that, in general, very old rattlesnakes 

 have very few bells, or rattles ; and he asks, " Uo the young crotali, when alarmed or in 

 danger, take shelter in the stomach (or oesophagus) of both their parents, or the mother 

 only?" Carver says, " I once killed a female that had seventy young ones in its belly; 

 but those were perfectly formed, and I saw them just before retire to the mouth of then- 

 mother, as a place of security on my approach." Several intelligent persons say the 

 same of the common viper, in England, and yet the London viper catchers assert that 

 it never happens. In the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, respect- 

 able testimony is adduced to establish similar occurrences. It is said that wild penny- 

 royal, or dittany of Virginia, is fatal to this serpent, and that it never comes in places 

 where it grows. See Lorvlhorp's Philosophical Transactions, vol. 2. 



Van der Donk, in his account of the New Netherland, says, that there grows in New 

 Netherland the snakeroot, which, as soon as the rattlesnake smells, he dies ; that a large 

 rattlesnake was found on Long Island, and some present took of that herb, and, after 

 chewing it, fixed it on the end of a stick, and held it at some distance from the snake's 

 nose, and that it no sooner inhaled the scent than it was seized with a fit of trernblmsr, and 



