52 
POWER OF SNAKES. 
those animals only are broken which are very disproportionate to the 
size of the serpent which destroys them. 
The statements made by different writers respecting the bulk and 
form of many of the animals destroyed and swallowed by snakes, 
have been received with more incredulity than they perhaps deserve. 
So frightful a spectacle as that exhibited by a buffalo or a tiger strug- 
gling with an enormous serpent, may have exalted the imagination of 
its beholders, and have led them into hyperbolical description ; but 
there is nothing in the mere fact which is contrary to our knowledge 
of animal power and function. Without going into an elaborate 
argument to show that the quantity and kind of muscular fibre pos- 
sessed by a snake twenty or thirty feet in length, must necessarily 
enable it to perform the feats which have been related of it, I may 
remark, that the power of the snake, in fracturing the bones of ani- 
mals by its muscular folds, gives less occasion for astonishment than 
the removal of the limb of, a man by one effort of the maxillary 
muscles of a shark. And whoever has considered the dilatable powers 
of a living muscular and membranous bag, will feel no surprise that a 
goat was swallowed by a snake whose gullet measured six feet six 
inches, and stomach one foot nine inches, in length ; nor will he 
hesitate to believe, that such a cavity was capable of containing a 
much larger animal, or that the corresponding organ in a snake of 
greater dimensions might contain one equal in bulk to any of those 
which according to some writers have been ingulfed in the entrails of 
serpents. The difficulty lies in conceiving, how large animals pass 
the narrow orifice between the jaws, which confine the entrance of 
the swallow ; but this vanishes when the structure of the part is care- 
fully examined. The two bones composing the lower jaw (I take my 
description from the great snake of Java) are not in contact in 
front, nor united by an unyielding medium, but are separated by 
a loose dilatable membrane, and connected with the upper jaw 
by intermaxillary bones *, which permit an enlargement of the cavity 
* This structure is also pointed out by Mr. Corse Scott, in the Edinburgh Philosophical 
Transactions. 
