Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/510

494 story of a large python having caught two wild sucking-pigs simultaneously, crushing both with the same coil of its neck. In the case of the python mentioned above, which was killed by the horns of the buck that it had swallowed, the snake must have been able to break all the bones of the body, but the stag's horns were probably too sharp and pointed to be easily crushed, and the snake rashly took the chance of digesting them in its stomach. No stories of a python killing a man ever came to my knowledge, but one of the keepers at the Calcutta Zoölogical Gardens had his arm much injured one morning by a python coiling itself on it and squeezing it severely before the man could be rescued.

It has been mentioned that large rewards are paid throughout India for killing venomous snakes. The actual number of snakes for which rewards were paid in 1886 was 417,596, and the sum paid was 25,360 rupees, which is a little more than a penny each in the depreciated silver currency. These rewards are almost invariably paid, or ought to be paid, by the English magistrates themselves, after examining the dead snakes. Numerous attempts are made to pass off harmless snakes as poisonous snakes; and a highly educated native official will rarely condescend to allow a dead snake to come too closely between the wind and his nobility, to enable him to distinguish between the poisonous and the nonpoisonous snakes. If the rewards were not paid by an English officer, a considerable portion of them would probably be intercepted by unscrupulous native subordinates before they reached the man who killed the snake.

When the Duke of Argyll was Secretary of State for India, he, as a student of natural history, took a special interest in the question of killing poisonous snakes. And there came to him one day at the India Office the cunning inventor of a machine called an asphyxiator, by which it was easily demonstrated that the snakes could be killed in large numbers in the holes in which they dwell in India. It was not difficult to show to his grace that when the asphyxiator was applied to a rabbit-hole the rabbit must either bolt or be suffocated. The snake would be treated in the same way as a rabbit. So the duke ordered some twenty asphyxiators, and sent them out to different parts of India. It happened that I was employed near Calcutta, and the Government of Bengal were pleased to order me to make a trial of the consignment of asphyxiators, which they regarded as so many white elephants. The asphyxiators were unpacked, and the instructions which accompanied them were read. There was a sort of fire-box in which a pestilently smelling paper was to be burned. There was a wheel to be turned, so as to send the smoke from the burning paper through a funnel into a long nozzle which was to be inserted into the snake's hole. This, it will be seen, required the services of two