HEBPETOLOGICAL NOTES.— LONGMAN . 
45 
quite foreign to their diet.”* So far as the common Black Snake is concerned 
our experience is at variance with Ditmars’ notes, for this species prefers frogs 
to any other food. In captivity it feeds regularly on the commoner species of 
batrachians, and these constitute the food which is most abundant in the swampy 
localities where this snake is generally found. Possibly Australian snakes have 
a prejudice against American frogs. 
The writer has some doubt as to the truth of the popular notion that a 
snake is easily killed. When a reptile succeeds in crawling away after having 
received a smart blow on the back, the would-be slayer almost invariably assumes 
that it has “crawled away to die.” But in many cases, unless wounded in the 
cardiac region, it is more likely that it recovers. Several remarkable instances 
have come to our personal knowledge in which snakes have subsequently 
recovered although they had received so severe a blow that the posterior half 
of the body seemed limp and lifeless. In one case a Carpet Snake, Python 
variegatus, Gray, was encountered at night in a fowlhouse after it had devoured 
a small fowl. It was stunned by a hard blow; its ventral surface was cut open 
and the fowl extracted, and the snake was then left for dead. Next morning 
it was not to he seen, and three days later it was found, still alive, under a heap 
of wood a hundred yards away, and was finally despatched. Those who have 
had occasion to obtain specimens of the larger venomous snakes in Australia 
(particularly Pseudechis porphyriacus ) will readily realise that country residents 
prefer to kill a snake “two or three times over,” and thus preclude all possibility 
of a resurrection. Among our own experiences the case of a small Diomenia 
psammopliis may be given as an instance of tenacity. When placing this 
specimen over six months ago in a small vivarium, it sprung upwards before 
the lid could be properly closed, with the result that the cover fell on its back 
about one-third from the head. For some weeks after this the whole of its 
body posterior to the injured part was incapable of motion. During two periods 
of eedysis the snake was unable to free itself behind this part, and the epidermis 
had to he removed by the writer. The disruption of the vertebras was so 
marked as to be conspicuous on the dorsal surface. Notwithstanding this, the 
snake gradually recovered the use of its posterior part. It is now lively and 
healthy, and will often take three or four small lizards in succession and eat 
them with surprising speed. 
* Zoologica, New York Zool. Soc., vol. i, No. 2, p. 226. 
