Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/84

74 branches of a thorny, yellow-blossomed acacia. The sun was blazing down fiercely on him as, with half-distended hood held close to the ground, he slowly passed through the leaves and flowers. For a few minutes I watched his movements through my binocular glass; but, fearing he might notice me and escape into some hole, I picked up my six-foot hunting stick and rushed toward him, intending to press his head to the ground with it, and then take him by the neck with my hand. He saw me coming, and, like a valiant warrior that knew his power, he faced round and stood erect with expanded hood and quivering tongue ready to receive me. His bright black eyes sparkled with energetic defiance, and every fiber of his being was electrified with excitement. While I was yet ten feet away he struck toward me with such force that the impetus carried him flat to the ground. In trying to get my stick across his neck he dodged it, and it came instead across the middle of his body. At this moment he was between me and the sun, with about five feet between his face and mine. I looked into his eyes and held him down firmly. His rage seemed redoubled. He leaned backward to make a more vigorous dash at me, and as he struck forward the mouth partially opened, and two tiny streams of venom shot from his fangs as from a syringe, one of them catching me on the face just beneath the eye. Had it gone a little higher up I should have been blinded for months, and perhaps had my sight permanently injured. This unexpected attack made me hasten the capture; so, getting his neck pressed down to the ground with the stick, I soon had him grasped in my hand just behind the head in such a way that he couldn't possibly turn to bite me—which he made every effort to do for some minutes afterward. Taking him home with much satisfaction I made him thereafter my fellow-lodger. While living in his cage, I observed him many times squirt the venom from his fangs against the glass of its front. Thenceforth my doubts about spitting snakes were removed.

In order to understand how it is that he can eject the venom as high as a person's face—which we never hear of the viperine snakes doing—it is well to consider carefully the approximate difference in the fangs of the cobra and those of the rattler. Snakes of the class Viperidæ can and do under certain circumstances eject the venom somewhat similarly, but their methods of striking are more deliberate usually, and instead of the first and more copious discharge being thus lost, as is often the case with the cobra, it is, on the contrary, injected into the veins of enemy or prey. This premature squirting out of the fluid in the cobra is not to be taken as a voluntary act. It has