EXCELSIOR 
II I’nrU Row, New Yorlt 
82 UulTulo SI., Hoc*l»e»ler 
I #3.00 l* EH YEAR. 
J Single A'o., Eight Cents, 
FOR THE WEEK ENDING SATURDAY, DEG. 17,187D 
[Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by D. I). T. Moohk, In the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.] 
yet.— g, k. Ratcitall, Clarendon , VI, 1870. 
“ Water Snake,” in the Rural 'New- 
Yorker, November 12th, says:—“ When 1 
read of it, 1 know that the whole story is 
either false, or the narrator was so excited 
that he thought it hissed.” 
Now, all he knows about It is that he 
never heard one hiss. The only venomous 
snake, the habits ol'which arc familiar to 
me, is the rattlesnake; l have seen and 
heard them hiss many times. They do not 
always hiss—in fact, it is rather rare. Per¬ 
haps not more than one in a dozen, as they 
are accidentally encountered and killed, will 
do so. 1 have heard them before I saw 
them, and from the peculiarity of the sound 
have been painfully aware of some evil ven¬ 
omous presence. Snakes do liiss. They 
seem possessed, under certain conditions, of 
two individualities; the head, when severed 
from the body, retains tbo faculty of using 
its fangs as effectually as before; at. the same 
time, step on the tail of the headless body, 
and it will strike with as much precision as 
when the head was attached.— Bill Dick, 
Fredonia, N. T, 
In the Rural New-Yorker of Nov. 12, 
under the above caption, “Water Snake” 
affirms that “ no American snake makes any 
BOtlUd approaching the hiss, which is made 
in perfection by the goose.” W e have in this- 
spread out or close up, according to the ac¬ 
tions of their owner. The feathers are also 
stamped (Fig. 2) with the number of the 
bird, and the place of departure. 
One of the best towns for carrier pigeons 
is Antwerp, and for many years past, annual 
races between seventy or eighty birds have 
NOTES FOR NATURALISTS 
than the hawk, and thus is usually able to 
elude his antagonist’s vigilance. 
Several means of attaching the letter to the 
pigeon have been tried. Sometimes it was 
tied round the bird’s neck, at oilier times 
under its wing; neither of these, however, 
was found efficacious, as the string was apt 
n dzaturdist 
Do Sunken IlisH? 
Ip Sir “ Water Snake” would take lire 
trouble to disturb a New Hampshire black 
snake near his den, he could easily convince 
his snakeship that the black snakes of that 
CARRIER PIGEONS. 
This journal lias hitherto urged the im¬ 
portance of utilizing carrier pigeons as a 
means of communication between ships en¬ 
dangered at sea and the ports from which 
they sailed. It seems to us Ibis is a matter 
of vast importance, as relating both to the 
safety of passengers and ns a means of re¬ 
moving the uncertainty, painful solicitude, 
and anxiety of home friends. 
Their utility is now being proven by the 
pigeon posts which enables Prussian-guarded 
Paris to communicate with the outer world. 
And science and art have combined to ren¬ 
der this means of communication more com¬ 
plete than in the earlier days when it was 
most relied upon. For, no matter how large 
or strong the pigeon might be, the dispatch, 
from the necessity of lightness, was of the 
briefest nature. Now, however, the micro¬ 
scope and camera have been brought into 
play, and the French Government have 
lately informed us thet. no less than 3,600 
dispatches of twenty words each, in all 70,000 
words, can now be carried by one of these 
messengers. 
been flown thence to Paris. Though the 
speed of these birds is undoubtedly very 
great, it is not so considerable as generally 
imagined, and it is calculated that, in a 
course of from two to three hundred miles, 
a locomotive engine would beat the best 
carrier extant. 
State do sometimes hiss. I have several 
l imes been first apprised of the presence of 
the black snake by its low but perfectly dis¬ 
tinct hissing; I was not excited. Let W. 
8 . travel to New Hampshire, and if he “ex¬ 
periments” faithfully, he will find that the 
“ tradition” will not pass into oblivion just 
to break, and the message was usually 
wrapped round the leg, and secured with a 
piece of silk. Now a still better method is 
used, as shown in our engravings. The let¬ 
ter is rolled up and fastened to the middle 
feather of the tail (Fig. 1)—that which re¬ 
mains perfectly stationary when its fellows 
FlOUliH l. 
part of North Carolina, (Orange county,) a 
snake, which we cull the Spreading Adder, 
that hisses very much like the goose. 1 have 
heard them often, and seen them in the act of 
hitting, there being no reason at all for be¬ 
coming “so excited that I thought they 
hissed,” w hen they did not, as they arc lung- 
less, and of course entirely harmless. Wheth¬ 
er the snake is “ American ” or imported , “ to 
the manor born ” or a naturalized citizen, I 
have no means of ascertaining; but I do know 
that he hisses .— w. b. l. 
Figure 2. 
The reader is doubtlessly familiar with 
those photographs of the Lord’s Prayer or 
the Ten Commandments, which, though ap¬ 
pearing to the naked eye as the merest atom 
of dust, are nevertheless perfectly plain and 
legible under a good lens; and a writer in the 
Standard testifies to having seen a page of 
that journal thus compressed Into even less 
than the eighth of an inch. On this princi¬ 
ple it is evident that innumerable messages 
may be conveyed iu an iucredibly small 
space, the writing, indeed, being so farther 
condensed by the use of stenographic marks, 
more especially those now employed by the 
Telegraphic Companies. Thus, a regular 
line of post pigeons was established be¬ 
tween Tours and Paris, the birds being 
brought from the capital by the balloons. 
Any one can send a letter of twenty words 
to Paris on payment of fifty centimes per 
word. All he Ills to do is to send his mes¬ 
sage to the Tours Postal authorities, who 
will take care that it be expedited, though 
its safe arrival may be endangered by the 
legion of hawks which the Prussians at 
Versailles are reported to have procured to 
capture these ornithological postmen. The 
pigeon, however, is said to fly fur quicker 
How to JLeuvu Taxidermy. 
Tk you will permit one who lives on the 
other extreme of the Continent from your 
publication office, to answer a communica¬ 
tion iu the Rural New-Yokker, 1 would 
tell W. II. Baskktte that he can find the in¬ 
formation he desires, about preparing and 
stuffing the skins of animals and reptiles, as 
well as many other valuable things about 
the same topic, iu “ The Taxidermist’s Man¬ 
uel,” by Captain Thomas Brown, F. L. 8., 
&c. This book is published, 1 think, in Lon¬ 
don, Edinburgh and New York. It contains 
an immense amount of information in a small 
space, being printed in quite fine type.—C. 
B. TuiuuLL, Sun Francisco , Cat. 
