EXTIRPATION OF SERPENTS. 
Ill 
by him. In temperate climates, snakes are consumed by 
scarcely any beast or bird of prey except the stork, and they 
have few dangerous enemies but man, though in the tropics 
other animals prey upon them.* It is doubtful whether any 
species of serpent has been exterminated within the human 
period, and even the dense population of China has not been 
able completely to rid itself of the viper. They have, however, 
almost entirely disappeared from particular localities. The 
rattlesnake is now wholly unknown in many large districts 
where it was extremely common half a century ago, and Pal¬ 
estine has long been, if not absolutely free from venomous 
serpents, at least very nearly so.f 
Destruction of Fish. 
The inhabitants of the waters seem comparatively secure 
from human pursuit or interference by the inaccessibility of 
their retreats, and by our ignorance of their habits—a natural 
* It is very questionable whether there is any foundation for the pop¬ 
ular belief in the hostility of swine and of deer to the rattlesnake, and 
careful experiments as to the former quadruped seem to show that the sup¬ 
posed enmity is wholly imaginary. Observing that the starlings, stornelli , 
which bred in an old tower in Piedmont, carried something from their 
nests and dropped it upon the ground, about as often as they brought food 
to their young, I watched their proceedings, and found every day lying 
near the tower numbers of dead or dying slowworms, and, in a few cases, 
small lizards, which had, in every instance, lost about two inches of the 
tail. This part I believe the starlings gave to their nestlings, and threw 
away the remainder. 
f Kussell denies the existence of poisonous snakes in Northern Syria, 
and states that the last instance of death known to have occurred from the 
bite of a serpent near Aleppo took place a hundred years before his time. 
In Palestine, the climate, the thinness of population, the multitude of 
insects and of lizards, all circumstances, in fact, seem very favorable to the 
multiplication of serpents, but the venomous species, at least, are extremely 
rare, if at all known, in that country. I have, however, been assured by 
persons very familiar with Mount Lebanon, that cases of poisoning from 
the bite of snakes had occurred within a few years, near Hasbeiyeh, and at 
other places on the southern declivities of Lebanon and Hermon. In 
