an egg-eater known only from Bengal, some poisonous tree snakes, gliding 
snakes and sand snakes. Because of the situation of their fangs, they find 
it difficult to bring them into play. However, a few of the larger species 
such as the boomslang of South Africa are dangerous to man. The venom 
injected by this arboreal serpent affects the blood stream of victims, de¬ 
stroying numbers of red corpuscles and increasing the white cells. This 
type of toxic action is called haemolytic in contradistinction to the neuro¬ 
toxic, or nerve-paralyzing effects characteristic of cobras, coral snakes and 
kraits. Vipers and rattlers also dispense a haemolytic type of poison. 
Front-fanged Poisonous Snakes or elapids are to be found in all 
tropical countries. Some of the deadliest of all snakes are included in 
this classification. Typical examples are the banded coral snakes of tropical 
America, the southern United States, and Australia, the six-foot hooded 
black snake, the tiger snake, the viperlike death “adder,” the death-dealing 
kraits which are responsible in part for the high snake-bite mortality in 
Malaya, the South African tree-living mamba, and the well-known cobras 
of Africa and southern Asia. 
Movable-fanged Poisonous Snakes (vipers and rattlesnakes) differ 
from other poisonous snakes in that their fangs are situated on the front 
of their upper jaws and, as indicated, are movable. This permits the snake 
to fold its fangs back into a position parallel to the roof of the mouth 
when they are not in use. Vipers and rattlers are cosmopolitan except for 
the Australian region and Madagascar. Most members of this ordei are 
large, stout snakes with fairly prominent flattened heads. 
SNAKE-BITE 
To date there is no accurate means of even estimating the number of 
deaths from snake-bite each year throughout the world. This is due largely 
to the difficulty of keeping a faithful check on some of the more congested 
regions of the East, where most of these fatalities occur. In India alone, 
for instance, it is believed that as many as 20,000 natives fall victim each 
year to the different varieties of deadly snakes which infest the peninsula. 
But there is still no way of establishing the accuracy of this figure. 
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