NATURAL HISTORY OF SELBORNE. 447 
handling poisonous snakes or any wild animal; one end of a 
piece of cord is tied on to the end of a stick, the other end 
is made to run loose through a turn in the cord ; the noose is 
then slipped over the head of the snake, and thus he can be 
easily transferred from a box to a cage or other receptacle. Mr. 
Bartlett informs me that when a poisonous snake arrives at 
the Zoological Gardens they transfer him to his new residence 
by unfastening the lid of the box and leaving it on loose ; they 
then put the box into the cage and with a long crooked iron rod 
push off the lid and hook out the snake ; when they wish to 
remove the snake from the cage into the box, an apparatus like 
Major Kogers's or even a common twitch, like that sometimes 
used by farriers to hold a horse by the nose, is used. 
Eattle of Eattlesnake. — There is a no more deadly snake 
than the rattlesnake. In this horribly poisonous reptile we find 
a most extraordinary apparatus to facilitate its 
getting up to its prey. This consists of liter- 
ally a rattle on the end of its tail. 
Mr. Thomas Hughes, M.P., in January 1871, 
was kind enough to give me a very fine specimen 
of the rattle of a rattlesnake. It is about two 
inches and a half long, and is composed of 
nine joints. This piece of mechanism is one 
of the most wonderful in the animal Avorld. It 
is composed of a horny material, very thin, and 
is almost as transparent as the sheets of gela- 
tine in which bon-bons are wrapped. It is 
difficult to explain its ultimate structure in 
words. The rattle before me is formed of nine 
complete boxes, fitted one into the other in a 
more ingenious way than any puzzle made by 
human hands, even those of the Chinese ; these 
boxes fit one into the other so that it is impos- 
sible to get them apart without breaking them. 
See figure. 
The rattle is rather more than half an inch across. The 
snake does not carry it with its broad side to the ground, 
but with one edge up and the other down ; when shaken 
with the human hand the noise it makes is very like the 
noise from a child's rattle ; but when the snake plays upon his 
own instrument its sound is cjuick and sharp like shot when 
dropped on a tin plate. I am told that when the snake rattles 
in the open air the sound appears to come from anywhere but 
the spot where the snake lies. There can be no doubt that 
