Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/680

662 is known as "man-creeper" or "man-killer," and it is thought that each contains poison enough to kill (if given internally) as many men as the animal has spots!

There are a great many stories afloat of snakes having lived for months or even years in the human stomach. I quote the following account from the "Bucks County Intelligencer," Pa.:

"A Connecticut lady tells us that, as a child, she knew of more than one person 'who had swallowed a snake's egg.' The snake grew, and when hungry, would 'cluck' in the throat of its unwilling host. The only way to get rid of the uncanny tenant was for the person to fast until hunger compelled the snake to venture out to a plate of untasted victuals upon the table. This is a genuine myth that no doubt still exists in the central part of Connecticut."

A Massachusetts country girl told me of another case which she said she had never thought of doubting; a lady was long annoyed by the presence of a snake in her stomach supposed to have been swallowed while still very small in drinking-water. She finally decoyed from its quarters the unwelcome occupant by boiling a large dish of milk, over which she bent until the snake came out to feed. Similar myths are common in New England, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, in which eels or "lizards" (newts) take the place of snakes. In the "South End" of Boston there lives a man who is nicknamed "Lizard" by the street-boys, because it is currently reported that he for many years unwillingly entertained one of these batrachian parasites. In every instance it is believed that the only relief possible is to coax forth the creature by some tempting dish of food or drink. I can not refrain from quoting verbatim another of these fables which I heard narrated not long since:

"I knew uv a man in Nova Scotia, who wuz drinkin' frum a pond one day, 'nd he swallowed a young lizard that lived 'nd grew in his stomach a long time. At last he suffered so much that his frien's bound um fast t' a tree so he couldn' help umself to water er any kind uv drink, 'nd kep' um fer three days on salt pork. Uv course 't the end uv that time he wuz very thirsty, 'nd ez soon ez his ropes were vmtied he hurried to a runnin' brook 'nd bent down over the water t' drink, 'nd the lizard came out t' drink, 'nd so he got rid of um."

In the Boston papers more than a year ago this oft-repeated story appeared in a still more incredible form. A bat was reported to have been expelled alive from the stomach of a woman, where it had lived for seven years on a diet consisting chiefly of milk and water. Probably most such fictions could be disposed of in as summary a way as that in which the well-known comparative anatomist. Prof. Jeffries Wyman, is said, in a printed