Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/629

Rh around in a circle once or twice, and then eat still. The chemicals began to operate. First its legs and then its wings commenced to tremble; trying to stand upright, it put its feet farther and farther apart and finally spread its wings, but to no purpose; a convulsive tremor seized it, and with a gasp it fell over on its side; and only at that moment did the snakes glide up to take possession of their prey. The same experiment was tried with a ground-squirrel and two half-grown chickens, and always with an analogous result. No animal likely to offer serious resistance was captured outright by the rattlesnakes. They managed to fetch it a bite and let it go, relying on the virus to do the rest.

Two causes conspire to make this the only practicable course for a moderate-sized reptile not gifted with the wildcat-like agility of the blacksnake. In the first place the fangs of a serpent are not rigid like those of a fox or shark, but movable and rather slender, and utterly unfit for seizing and holding struggling animals, excepting those of the smallest size. The poison-teeth of a rattlesnake are even retractile, and, being only attached to the palate by an elastic ligament, can be drawn backward by a temporal muscle, like the blade of a clasp knife into its handle, and are too feeble to penetrate the skin of a tapir or hog, which animals attack and devour the most poisonous snakes with perfect impunity. With such teeth they can only administer a snap-bite.

On the other hand, the effect of the poison is never instantaneous: a man can walk two or three miles before his bitten leg begins to swell; a snake-bitten dog can run for a couple of minutes without exhibiting any signs of uneasiness. A large bird may possibly fly away and out of sight, while even the smallest birds are able to take wing for a moment, and rats to make a dash toward their holes. The snakes know this, and bide their time with all the complacency of a veteran angler who holds a fish by a long line and permits it to exhaust its strength before he pulls home.

In the course of the countless ages during which men and serpents have been co-inhabitants of this planet, it is not only possible but certain that some hunters or wood-cutters happened to witness the last act of an oft-repeated tragedy, the strange movements and subsequent convulsions of a bird or little rodent hopping, perhaps, in a helpless way around or even toward a snake that had watched it with glittering eyes. The first act they could only have seen indistinctly and from a distance, since their approach would have saved the victim by scaring it away in time. So they jumped at the conclusion that the eyes of the reptile had bewitched the poor creature, and found believers who would be very sorry to demolish such a delightfully mystic theory by prosaic investigations; as for cognate reasons our spiritualistic contemporaries prefer to believe that the writing on the slate was produced by the "dear friend in the spirit-land," rather than