Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/383

Rh a reputed final cure for toothache is to bite into a living blacksnake. An old saying—

 Break your first brake, Kill your first snake, And you'll conquer all your enemies"—

is often recalled by the first snake one meets in the spring, or at sight of the earliest fern. I find few children can be persuaded that our common snakes are not "poisonous." And here and there throughout New England it is believed that the common water-adder (Tropidonotus sipedon) is most venomous, and that it carries "a sting in its tail"! This fictitious appendage of the adder suggests the remarkable hold that the belief in "hoop-snakes," and their extraordinary gymnastics, has obtained in many of the remoter and more heavily wooded portions of the country. This imaginary creature is said to have a sting in its tail, which, when about to make an attack, it takes in its mouth, so as to form a hoop, then it rolls along (by preference down a steep hill-side) toward the intended victim, whom it strikes in passing with its sting. I can find no foundation for belief in any such animal.

Some dozen years ago, while I was connected with a high-school in Northwestern Missouri, my pupils tried hard to convince me that "jointed snakes" were not uncommon there. I was told that, if one of these snakes were struck a sharp blow, it would quickly break into many pieces, which, being very brittle, were apt to fly about in different directions, so that it would be difficult to find all of them; but if left alone, after the danger was past, these scattered parts or "joints" would "crawl together," fall into order, and creep off as good as new. There was so much testimony concerning this marvelous reptile, that I was tempted to think there was some basis of truth for the belief in its existence, but, after minute inquiry, I concluded that the whole story had probably grown out of the fact that there is a certain lizard (Opheosaurus ventralis), popularly known as the "glass-snake," whose tail is so fragile that it breaks easily when struck. I find that, at least in one village in Eastern Massachusetts, the boys insist that, if you cut off the head of a certain kind of snake, it will grow on to the body again and the snake will live.

Another most absurd notion whose connection with the subject of snakes is, however, wholly nominal, is that horse-hairs, if allowed to remain in a pond or puddle of water, will become living creatures "turn into snakes" is the technical term among boys, I believe, for the supposed metamorphosis. It would seem that, by way of teachers long before this, Professor Agassiz's article on this subject might have worked its way even into very provincial districts. Nevertheless, only last year, a young man in a thriving Western college earnestly supported the theory, and tried hard to convince his professor in zoölogy