140 
CREATURES OF MYSTERY 
world would like to know more of the type of fuel used. With 
the use of fuel of such potency, our largest army bombers 
would be enabled to fly non-stop for ten millions of miles. 
Gradually it dawned upon us that we had begun an investi¬ 
gation into a field which had never been explored. The rea¬ 
sons, of course, are perfectly obvious. Members of scientific 
bodies simply cannot spare the time from their normal activi¬ 
ties to devote to a study of the rattler in the wild state. He is 
so crafty and sly that anyone going out deliberately to make a 
study of him, to the exclusion of all else, would find it too dull 
a life—too devoid of worthwhile results. It could not be guar¬ 
anteed to them that they would, even in a lifetime, happen upon 
a single occurrence worth recording. The layman goes about 
his work, but when one in tens of thousands happen to stumble 
upon something worth noting, the whole scientific world adopts 
an attitude highly prejudicial to the layman’s claims. When 
asked if these things are true they usually insist modestly, “No 
reputable scientist has ever witnessed it.” All of which means 
that if a scientist doesn’t see it, then it’s no good. 
As stated elsewhere, the subject-matter going into the prep¬ 
aration of this volume represents the combined observations 
of more than one hundred observers who have lived as neigh¬ 
bors to rattlers from childhood to old age. As stated in the 
preface, if the lives of all who have contributed to its contents 
were pooled into that of a single individual, and he had been 
born one thousand years prior to the reign of the Pharaohs, he 
would still be tramping river swamps, hardwood hummocks, 
and sand ridges throughout the Deep South, and with his ob¬ 
servations still incomplete. 
The services of laymen are often employed by astronomers 
very advantageously. Infinite space cannot be searched with 
painstaking care every minute of the night by the regular per¬ 
sonnel of the few large astronomical observatories of the 
world. For such reasons comets, or even hitherto uncharted 
planetoids may be within plain view of them, and yet remain 
undetected. If a layman, or amateur astronomer, should make 
an observation in some remote corner of the universe which 
he deems of sufficient importance he can, via telegraph, direct 
