ANIMALS DESTROYED BY SNAKES. 
51 
grounds about my house. One evening early in July, hearing a noise, I 
went out, and discovered that the snake had left his harbour under the 
boards of a stable where he generally kept, and having entered a small 
shed in which some fowls were at roost, had contrived to sweep eleven 
from the perch, which he afterwards destroyed by pressing them 
between his folds. Then taking them one by one, head foremost 
into his mouth, swallowed the whole in twenty minutes. The largest 
animal that he ate while in my possession was a calf, which he killed 
and gorged in two hours and twenty minutes. He preferred goats 
to any other animals, but was also fond of calves, sheep, and fowls ; 
he never attacked dogs, cats, or pigs. Of these last, indeed, he 
seemed to be in dread, for whenever one was presented to him, he 
retired to a corner, and coiled himself up with his head undermost. 
If regularly fed with animals not larger than a duck, he ate readily 
every day ; but after the meal of a goat, refused food for a month.” 
In the different accounts given by authors of the destruction of large 
animals by serpents, much discrepancy of statement exists respecting 
the breaking of their bones. Whilst some have declared that their 
cracking has been heard at a considerable distance *, others have pro- 
duced instances of the bodies of large animals in which no “ ossifrac- 
tion” had taken place, having been found in the stomachs of serpents, j- 
The bones of the animals swallowed by Capt. Heyland’s snake were 
not fractured, as far as “ a looker-on could discover and although 
many of the by-standers conceived that they heard the breaking of 
the bones of the goat which he swallowed on board the Caesar, I am 
disposed to attribute much to the force of their imagination. I lis- 
tened attentively, and heard only the snapping of his scales as they 
slipped over each other during his manifold movements. On opening 
him after death, I found indeed a portion of one of the goat’s 
legs which seemed to have been fractured ; but as the same kind of 
appearance might have been the consequence of its partial digestion, 
it is not to be depended on. The truth perhaps is, that the bones of 
* Cleyerus de Serpente urobubulum deglutiente. 
f Mr. Corse Scott, in the Transactions of the Edinburgh Royal Society, Vol. vi. p. 230. 
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