Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/509

Rh village pigs in India, which are well known as scavengers and carrion-eaters. They will kill and eat any snake that comes in their way, and the hide of their hard and hairy bodies and legs is almost snake-proof. But if a cobra bites a pig on a soft place, so as to plant his poison under the skin, that pig will surely die.

The python, or boa constrictor, is comparatively common in Bengal, and sometimes grows to a great size. The first one that I saw was said to be twenty -four feet long, but it had been dead for several days, and the stench from it was longer than the street in which it was being exhibited to a crowd of admiring natives, and I could not venture to measure it. I saw another, which was said to be twenty-one feet long, being carried dead through the street of Dacca, but was unable to stop to measure it for myself. An officer, whose veracity I did not mistrust, told me he had found one in Cachar twenty-five feet long, which had committed suicide by swallowing a buck hog-deer, of which the horns injured and cut through the intestines of the snake before the gastric juices could soften the horns. There was a plentiful supply of pythons at the Zoölogical Gardens in Calcutta. One large one, which measured nearly eighteen feet, sat most patiently for more than a month over a batch of its eggs, and it was hoped that her perseverance and motherly affection would be rewarded by a young brood. But for some unknown reason the eggs were all addled. During her long incubation the mother snake was never seen to quit her eggs; and she would take no kind of food, although rats and chickens were offered to her from day to day.

It is not every one who has seen a python take a meal. It is usually averse to dead food; but it is very partial to a live rabbit or a chicken or a guinea-pig or by preference a rat. The python seems to know that the rat will try to escape, and he gives it no time or quarter. With a rapidity that can hardly be conceived, he seizes the rat with his mouth, and the fatal coil passes round the creature, squeezing all life out of it, and reducing the body to the form of an elongated sausage, which the snake lubricates with its own slime and swallows entire. If a fowl is put into a python's cage, the snake sometimes seems to take no notice, and the frightened bird, finding that no harm comes to it, begins to ruffle its feathers and to peck about, occasionally trying its beak on the snake's skin. But after a while the end of the python's tail may be seen to quiver with a strange emotion, while the small black beady eye is fixed upon the fowl. Suddenly there is a convulsion. The snake has moved and the fowl has disappeared, and can only be discovered by the end of a feather or two protruding from the coils in the python's neck which have crushed the bird's life out. In its natural state the python will catch a deer or a wild pig, and crush it in the powerful coils of its neck. There is a