The Romance of Natural History Part 12

Seba records that he had received these Serpents from the Island of St Domingo. This was at that time a flouris.h.i.+ng French colony, and its natural productions were far better known to Europe than they now are.

When I visited the neighbouring island of Jamaica in 1845-46, I heard accounts of a wonderful animal occasionally seen in the eastern districts of the island, which was reported as a Snake with a c.o.c.k's comb and wattles, and which crowed like a c.o.c.k. A good deal of mystery attached to this strange Serpent.

It was appropriated to a very remarkable and peculiar character of scenery:--A wild mountain-region, formed of white limestone, abounding in narrow glens, bounded by abrupt precipices, and permeated by whispering streams that frequently pour in slender cascades over the rocks. The limestone rock rises in abrupt terraces, wall above wall, and its entire surface is most singularly honeycombed, "as if wrought by a graving tool into rough diamond-points," alternating with smooth and rounded holes of various sizes, from that of a hazel-nut upward. In many of these hollows lie the small land-sh.e.l.ls of the country, bleached perfectly white, like the stone itself, of the genera _Helix_, _Cyclostoma_, _Helicina_, _Cylindrella_, _Achatina_, &c., many of them perfect, but many more in fragments. They exactly resemble fossil sh.e.l.ls _in situ_, but the species are absolutely identical with those that crawl over the shrubs and trees in the same region. In very many cases the dead sh.e.l.ls accurately fit the hollows in the rock, whose interior is impressed with the form and sculpturing of the sh.e.l.l in _intaglio_:--a most curious and interesting fact, as it points to the very recent formation of the region, the stone bearing evident tokens of having been in a plastic condition when the sh.e.l.ls were enveloped in it.

Out of the hollows of the rock, their roots fast grasping the sharp-edged projections and tooth-like points of stone, and twining through the tortuous cavities, and insinuating their fibrils into every minute hollow where water may lodge, grow many tall trees of various kinds, interlaced with climbers, and hung with festoons of _lianes_, that resemble long and twisted cords, thrown from one to another, or depending from the branches towards the ground. The n.o.ble Agave, or what we in England call the American Aloe, here throws out its broad, fleshy, spine-edged leaves, and lifts its tall flower-stalk loaded with the candelabra-like branches of bloom; and numerous thick _Cacti_, some erect and ma.s.sive, others whip-like, long and trailing, give a peculiar aspect to the vegetation. Great tufts of _Orchide{oe}_,--the lovely _Broughtonia_, with its thick ovate leaves, and racemes of elegant crimson flowers, the _Brasavola_, with long leaves resembling porcupine-quills in form, and blossoms of virgin white, the _Oncidium_, with its yellow and red flowers, like a score of painted b.u.t.terflies dancing in every breath, and many others,--crowd the forks or droop from the twisted boughs of the trees.

This formation of honeycombed limestone is full of caverns, many of which lead into one another in chains, and which have invested the region with a sort of superst.i.tious mystery. Runaway slaves and outlaws have availed themselves of the facilities which its ravines and inaccessible fastnesses afford, to defy capture; and during the rebellion of the Maroons, it attained a considerable notoriety. There is one estate about eight miles from Kingston, in the immediate vicinity of which the famous hero, Three-fingered Jack, made his head-quarters. It is a district of wild torrents and waterfalls of the most romantic character; "the imagination of no painter of theatrical spectacles can surpa.s.s the wild wonders of the mountain-hold of the _real_ Three-fingered Jack. Part of the road by which you ascend the falls is a subterranean pa.s.sage; and caverns are entered by simple crevices which seem mere c.h.i.n.ks in the irregular surface of the rock, all which natural peculiarities account for the mysterious disappearances which the mountain hero was enabled to enact from his pursuers."

It was at this spot I first heard reliable tidings of the strange Crested Snake. A medical gentleman of reputation informed me that he had seen, in 1829, a serpent of about four feet in length, but of unwonted thickness, dull ochry in colour with well-defined dark spots, having on its head a sort of pyramidal helmet, somewhat lobed at the summit, of a pale red hue. The animal, however, was dead, and decomposition was already setting in. He informed me that the negroes of the district were well acquainted with it; and that they represented it as making a noise, not unlike the crowing of a c.o.c.k, and as being addicted to preying on poultry.

Nor is it in Jamaica alone that the Crested Snake is known. In the island of St Domingo, whence Seba received his curious specimens, my friend Mr Hill heard reports of it. A Spanish gentleman whom he was visiting in Hayti, told him that he had seen it, and begged him to note it among the remarkable things of the country. It was in that far east of the island, known as the ancient Caciquedom of Higuey, where the Indians were of a more warlike disposition than their meek brethren of the centre and west, and where the cruelties perpetrated upon them by their Spanish invaders reached such a superhuman pitch of diabolism, that even Las Casas says he almost feared to repeat them. The limestone mountains are here of exactly the same description as those in Jamaica, and the scenery a.s.sumes exactly the same romantic character. My friend's Spanish informant had seen the serpent with mandibles like a bird, with a c.o.c.k's crest, with scarlet lobes or wattles; and he described its habits,--perhaps rather from common fame than from personal observation,--as a frequenter of hen-roosts, into which it would thrust its head, and deceive the young chickens by its imitative physiognomy, and by its attempts to crow, like their own Chanticleer. "Il canta como un Gallo;" was the report in Hayti, just as in Jamaica.

I was much interested in this mysterious reptile, and mentioned in the public papers my wish to possess a specimen. A gentleman of the vicinity, Mr Jasper Cargill, was so desirous to oblige me that he offered a sovereign for one; but though several persons were prompt to promise the capture, no example was forthcoming.

After my return from Jamaica, the occurrence of two specimens found came under the notice of my friend, but neither of them was preserved. Mr Cargill had informed him that some years before, when visiting Skibo, in St George's, an estate of his father's, in descending the mountain-road, his attention was drawn to a snake of a dark hue, that erected itself from amid some fragments of limestone-rock that lay about. It was about _four feet long_, and unusually _thick-bodied_. His surprise was greatly increased on perceiving that it was _crested_, and that from the side of the cheeks depended some _red-coloured flaps_, like gills or wattles.

After gazing at him intently some time, with its head well erect, it drew itself in, and disappeared among the fragmentary rocks.

The son of this gentleman met with another specimen under the following circ.u.mstances, as detailed to me by my friend:--"It was, I think, on Easter Eve, the 30th of March last, [1850,] that some youngsters of the town came running to tell me of a curious snake, unlike any snake they had ever seen before, which young Cargill had shot, when out for a day's sport among the woodlands of a neighbouring penn. They described it as in all respects a serpent, but with a very curious shaped head, and with wattles on each side of its jaws. After taking it in hand and looking at it, they placed it in a hollow tree, intending to return for it when they should be coming home, but they had strolled from the place so far that it was inconvenient to retrace their steps when wearied with rambling; but they had lost no time in relating the adventure to me, knowing it would interest me much, particularly as young Cargill's father had thought it a snake similar to the one he had seen at Skibo, in St George's, or to the crested serpent for a specimen of which, when in St Thomas's in the East, he had offered the sum of twenty s.h.i.+llings.

The youth that shot the snake fell ill on the following morning with fever, and could not go back to the woodlands to seek it, but he sent his younger brother who had been with him; but although he thought he rediscovered the tree in which his brother had placed it, he could not find the snake. He conjectured that the rats had devoured it in the night. When this adventure was related to me, another youth, Ulick Ramsay, a G.o.dson of mine, who came with the young Cargills to tell me of their discovery, informed me that not long previously, he had seen in the hand of the barrack-master-serjeant at the barracks in Spanish Town, a curious snake, which he, too, had shot among the rocks of a little line of eminences near the railway, about two miles out, called Craigallechie. It was a serpent with a curious shaped head, and projections on each side, which he likened to the fins of an eel, but said they were close up to the jaws. Here are, unquestionably, two of the same snakes with those of Seba's Thesaurus, taken near Spanish Town, and both about the honeycombed rocks that protrude through the plain of St Catherine's in detached ridges and cones and hummocks, being points of the greater lines of limestone, which have been covered by the detritus of the plains, leaving ma.s.ses of the under-rocks here and there uncovered. These are the spots frequented, too, by the _Cyclura_; and are continuations of our Red Hills--a country that so much resembles the terraced cliffs and red-soil glens of Higuey.

It is remarkable that I have heard nothing more of this serpent of renown, this true Basilisk, from that time till now; though I have no doubt my Jamaica friends, who had become much interested in the matter, would have communicated the specimen to me if any one had been obtained.

There is, however, sufficient evidence to a.s.sume the existence of such a form in the greater Antilles, whether Seba's figures be identical with it or not.

[141] _Op. cit._; vol. ii. pl. 40.

VII.

THE DOUBTFUL.

A very curious and unaccountable habit is attributed to some Reptiles, which, though a.s.serted by many witnesses, at different times and in distant countries, has not yet received the general a.s.sent of men of science. White of Selborne, in one of his charming letters to Pennant, has the following note:--"Several intelligent folks a.s.sure me that they have seen the Viper open her mouth and admit her helpless young down her throat on sudden surprises, just as the female Opossum does her brood into the pouch under her belly, upon the like emergencies. Yet the London viper-catchers insist on it, to Mr Barrington, that no such thing ever happens."[142]

The evidence of the London viper-catchers goes for no more than it is worth; those whom Mr Barrington applied to,--how many and of what experience I know not,--had not met with such a case. But negative evidence is of little weight against positive. At the same time, others of the same fraternity affirm the fact. There is, as Mr Martin observes, no physiological reason against the possibility of the young maintaining life for a brief period within the stomach of the parent. A swallowed frog has been heard, by Mr Bell, to cry several minutes after it had been swallowed by a snake; and the same excellent authority has seen another frog leap out of the mouth of a snake which had swallowed it, taking advantage of the fact that the latter gaped, as they frequently do, immediately after taking food.

Mr Martin says he has conversed with several who had been a.s.sured by gamekeepers and gardeners that the swallowing of the young by vipers had been witnessed by them.[143] And Mr Blyth, a zoologist of established reputation, observes,--"I have been informed of this by so many credible eye-witnesses, that I cannot hesitate in yielding implicit credence to the fact. One man particularly, on whose word I fully rely, tells me that he has himself seen as many as thirteen young vipers thus enter the mouth of the parent, which he afterwards killed and opened for the purpose of counting them."[144]

Mr E. Percival, writing to the _Zoologist_, under date "64 Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, Oct. 17, 1848," narrates the following facts:--"When in Scotland, last autumn, I saw what at the time satisfied me that vipers really possessed this faculty, though the evidence was scarcely as conclusive as might have been wished. Walking along a sunny road, I saw a viper lying on the parapet. She had apparently just been killed by a blow from a stick. Five or six young ones, about four inches long, were wriggling about their murdered parent, and one was making its way out of her mouth, at the time when I approached. Whether this was the first time the young ones had seen the light, or whether they were only leaving a place of temporary refuge, I leave to more experienced observers than myself to determine."[145]

This communication brought out the following from the late Mr John Wolley:--"Mr Percival's interesting note (_Zool._, 2305) on this subject reminds me of a very similar anecdote, told me several years ago by a gentleman who is an accurate observer, and who has had long experience in all kinds of sports. He one day shot a viper, and almost immediately afterwards it was surrounded by young ones, in what appeared to him the most mysterious manner. But here the grand link was wanting which Mr Percival has supplied,--the young ones were not seen to come out of their mother's mouth. I may be allowed to mention an anecdote, told me in 1842, by an illiterate shepherd of Hougham, near Dover: he met me catching vipers, and, on my entering into conversation with him, he volunteered--without any allusion of mine--to tell this curious story.

One day his father came suddenly upon a viper surrounded by her young, she opened her mouth and they all ran down her throat; he killed her, and leaving her on the ground, propped her mouth open between two pieces of stick; presently the young ones crawled out: on the slightest alarm they retreated back again,--and this they did repeatedly for several days, during which time many people came to see it.[146] The young which White of Selborne cut out of the old female, and which immediately threw themselves into att.i.tudes of defiance, had probably not then seen the daylight for the first time. Mr Bell, in a note in Bennett's edition of White's 'Selborne,' mentions the wide-spread belief in this alleged habit of the viper; but appears to consider the fact not proved.

Accounts of similar habits in foreign viviparous snakes, common report, and, above all, Mr Percival's observation, leave no doubt on my mind about the matter."

The most recent case on record that I have met with, is the following, communicated to the _Zoologist_[147] for last December, by the Rev.

Henry Bond, of South Petherton:--

"Walking in an orchard near Tyneham House, in Dorsets.h.i.+re, I came upon an old adder basking in the sun, with her young around her; she was lying on some gra.s.s that had been long cut, and had become smooth and bleached by exposure to the weather. Alarmed by my approach, I distinctly saw the young ones run down their mother's throat. At that time I had never heard of the controversy respecting the fact, otherwise I should have been more anxious to have killed the adder, to prove the case. As it was, she escaped while I was more interested in the circ.u.mstance I witnessed than in her destruction."

Exactly the same thing is told of the North American Rattlesnake. Hunter says, that when alarmed, the young ones, which are eight or ten in number, retreat into the mouth of the parent, and reappear on its giving a contractile muscular token that the danger is past.[148]

M. Palisot de Beauvois a.s.serts that he saw a large rattlesnake which he had disturbed in his walks immediately coil itself up and open its jaws, when in an instant five small ones that were lying by it rushed into its open mouth. He concealed himself, and watched the snake, and in a quarter of an hour saw her discharge them. He then approached a second time, when the young ones rushed into the parent's mouth more quickly than before, and the animal immediately moved off, and escaped. The phenomenon is said to have been observed in regard to some of the venomous snakes of India, but I cannot now refer to details.

Confirmation of a reported fact is sometimes derived from collateral evidence, and such is not wanting in the present case. The phenomenon is not confined to serpents; it has been observed in their near relatives, the lizards. Mr Edward Newman, while guarding the subject with a philosophical caveat, furnishes his readers with the following highly interesting and germane statement:--"1st, My late lamented friend, William Christy, jun., found a fine specimen of the common scaly lizard with two young ones. Taking an interest in everything relating to Natural History, he put them into a small pocket vasculum to bring home; but when he next opened the vasculum the young ones had disappeared, and the belly of the parent was greatly distended; he concluded she had devoured her own offspring; at night the vasculum was laid on a table, and the lizard was therefore at rest: in the morning the young ones had reappeared, and the mother was as lean as at first. 2d, Mr Henry Doubleday, of Epping, supplies the following information:--A person whose name is English, a good observer, and one, as it were, brought up in Natural History, under Mr Doubleday's tuition, once happened to set his foot on a lizard in the forest, and while the lizard was thus held down by his foot, he distinctly saw three young ones run out of her mouth. Struck by such a phenomenon, he killed and opened the old one, and found two other young ones in her stomach, which had been injured when he trod upon her. In both these instances the narrators are of that cla.s.s who do know what to observe, and how to observe it; and the facts, whatever explanation they may admit, are not to be dismissed as the result of imagination or mistaken observation."[149]

It is remarkable that all the serpents to which the phenomenon is attributed are ovo-viviparous. Our common lizard, to which the facts just narrated doubtless belong (_Zootoca vivipara_), has the same property, which, however, appears to be by no means common among the Saurian races. This coincidence, while it would afford a handle to the deniers of the stated facts, in the a.s.sumption that the emergence of the living young from the abdomen, or their presence within it, has given rise to the notion--may have an essential significance and connexion with the phenomenon itself, on the hypothesis of its truth. That endowment, whatever it be, which enables the young to live and breathe in the abdominal cavity of the mother before birth, may render it easier for them than for others not so endowed to survive a temporary incarceration within the stomach after birth. Mr Newman does not know how to believe that a young and tender animal can remain in the strongly digestive stomach of a viper and receive no injury; but he has forgotten to take into the account the well-ascertained power that living tissues have the power of resisting the action of chemical re-agents that would instantly take effect upon them when dead. The walls of the stomach itself are not corroded by the gastric-juice which is rapidly dissolving the piece of meat within it. If the young animals can do without air for a while in their snug retreat, I do not think they would need fear the digestive operation. Air, I should suppose, _must_ be excluded from the stomach, unless the parent have the power of swallowing air voluntarily, for the emergency; but perhaps a cold-blooded animal like a reptile, with a sluggish circulation and respiration, might do with very much less fresh air than a mammal under similar conditions.

The proposed _rationale_ of those who reject these statements,--that female vipers in the last stage of pregnancy have been opened, and have given freedom to living and active young, and that careless and unscientific observers have leaped to the conclusion that their young must have entered by the mouth,--will not stand before the testimony distinctly given by witnesses, who have actually seen the young retreat into the mouth, and have then found them within the body. No doubt the subject needs further investigation by careful and unprejudiced naturalists; but the positive evidence already adduced on the testimony of so many deponents, warrants our accepting the phenomenon as a normal habit of certain species of Saurians and Ophidians, though it may be somewhat rarely resorted to, and that whatever physical difficulties may seem to stand in the way of its _a priori_ probability--difficulties which perhaps depend on our ignorance, and which will disappear before the light of advancing knowledge.

The entomologists have fallen most ungallantly foul of Madame Merian, a lady who resided in Surinam nearly two hundred years ago, and devoted her attention to the native entomology, painting insects in a very admirable manner. She is set down as a thorough heretic, not at all to be believed, a manufacturer of unsound natural history, an inventor of false facts in science.

Among other things, she speaks of a large hemipterous fly, which has in consequence of her reports been named _Fulgora lanternaria_. This insect has the head produced into a large inflated proboscis more than an inch in length, which is said to carry an intense luminosity within its transparent walls, as a candle is carried within a lantern. The fair observer says that the first discovery which she made of this property caused her no small alarm. The Indians had brought her several of these insects, which by daylight exhibited no extraordinary appearance, and she enclosed them in a box until she should have an opportunity of drawing them, placing it upon a table in her lodging-room. In the middle of the night the confined insects made such a noise as to awake her, and she opened the box, the inside of which, to her great astonishment, appeared all in a blaze; and in her fright letting it fall, she was not less surprised to see each of the insects apparently on fire. She soon, however, divined the cause of this unexpected phenomenon, and re-enclosed her brilliant guests in their place of confinement. She adds that the light of one of these Fulgorae is sufficiently bright to read a newspaper by: and though the tale of her having drawn one of these insects by its own light is without foundation, she doubtless might have done so if she had chosen.

This circ.u.mstantial and apparently truthful statement has brought no small odium on the fair narrator. Other naturalists who have had opportunities of seeing the insect in its native regions strongly deny its luminosity. The inhabitants of Cayenne, according to the French Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle, aver that it does not s.h.i.+ne at all; and this is confirmed by M. Richard, a naturalist, who reared the species. The learned and accurate Count Hoffmansegg states that his insect collector Herr Sieber, a practised entomologist of thirty years'

experience, who during a sojourn of several years in Brazil took many specimens of the _Fulgora lanternaria_, never saw a single one which was in the slightest degree luminous. There is a kindred species in China, _F. candelaria_, very common in those glazed boxes of insects which the Chinese sell to mariners; this also has been supposed to emit light, but Dr Cantor a.s.sures us that he has never observed the least luminosity in this species.

Thus it would seem that the obloquy which has fallen upon the ingenious lady is not altogether undeserved, and that for the sake of a telling story, she has been indeed "telling a story." But we may imagine her offended ghost looking round and saying, "All these gentlemen merely say they have _not_ seen the light; now I say I have: is there no one who will verify my statement?"

M. Lacordaire,--an authority on South American insects second to none, says that he himself indeed never saw a luminous _Fulgora_ all the time he was collecting in Brazil and Cayenne, and that most of the inhabitants of the latter country, when questioned on the subject, denied the fact, yet _that others of the natives as distinctly affirmed that it is luminous_. He asks whether it is not possible that the light may be confined to one s.e.x, and thus the conflicting testimony be reconciled; and gives it as his opinion that the point is rather one which requires more careful observation, than one which we can consider absolutely decided.[150]

Again, the Marquis Spinola, in an elaborate paper on this tribe, published in the Annals of the Entomological Society of France,[151]

strenuously contends that the remarkable development of the frontal portion of the head in the whole race is luminous. And finally, a friend of Mr Wesmael a.s.sured him that he had himself seen the American _Fulgora_ luminous while alive.[152]

It may help to sustain our faith in the veracity of Madame Merian, to know that there is some reason for attributing occasional luminosity to well-known English insects, of which hundreds, and even thousands, have been taken without manifesting a trace of the phenomenon. Mr Spence, in his interesting Letter on Luminous Insects,[153] adduces the following evidence:--Insects "may be luminous which have not hitherto been suspected of being so. This seems proved by the following fact: A learned friend has informed me, that when he was curate of Ickleton, Cambridges.h.i.+re, in 1780, a farmer of that place, of the name of Simpringham, brought to him a mole-cricket (_Gryllotalpa vulgaris_, Latr.), and told him that one of his people seeing a _Jack-o'-lantern_, pursued it, and knocked it down, when it proved to be this insect, and the identical specimen shewn to him.

"This singular fact, while it renders it probable that some insects are luminous which no one has imagined to be so, seems to afford a clue to the, at least, partial explanation of the very obscure subject of _ignes fatui_, and to shew that there is considerable ground for the opinion long ago maintained by Ray and Willughby, that the majority of these supposed meteors are no other than luminous insects. That the large varying lambent flames mentioned by Beccaria to be very common in some parts of Italy, and the luminous globes seen by Dr Shaw cannot be thus explained, is obvious. These were probably electrical phenomena; certainly not explosions of phosphuretted hydrogen, as has been suggested by some, which must necessarily have been momentary. But that the _ignis fatuus_ mentioned by Derham as having been seen by himself, and which he describes as flitting about a thistle, was, though he seems of a different opinion, no other than some luminous insect, I have little doubt. Mr Sheppard informs me that, travelling one night between Stamford and Grantham on the top of the stage, he observed for more than ten minutes a very large _ignis fatuus_ in the low marshy grounds, which had every appearance of being an insect. The wind was very high: consequently, had it been a vapour it must have been carried forward in a direct line; but this was not the case. It had the same motion as a _Tipula_, flying upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards, sometimes appearing as settled, and sometimes as hovering in the air.

Whatever be the true nature of these meteors, of which so much is said and so little known, it is singular how few modern instances of their having been observed are on record. Dr Darwin declares, that though in the course of a long life he had been out in the night, and in the places where they are said to appear, times without number, he had never seen anything of the kind; and from the silence of other philosophers of our own times, it should seem that their experience is similar."

A paper by Mr R Chambers on the subject adduces the additional testimony of facts observed by good naturalists, as d.i.c.kson and Curtis the eminent botanists, and Stothard the painter and entomologist, by his own father Mr A. Chambers, and by Joseph Simpson, a fisherman living near Boston, all of which strongly corroborate the probability that some, at least, of the _ignes fatui_ are produced by luminous insects.[154] Mr Main narrates the case of a farmer who stated that he had pursued a Will-o'-the-wisp, and coming up with it had knocked it down, when it proved to be an insect "exactly like a Maggy-long-legs"--that is, the common Crane-fly (_Tipula oleracea_), the very insect with which Mr Sheppard had compared the motions of the luminous flame observed by him.[155] Mr Spence argues that while gaseous emanations may be a cause of stationary _ignes fatui_, the same cause will not explain those which flit along from place to place; and that these are probably luminous insects, however rarely they may have come under the notice of entomologists. "A very strong argument for the possibility of some flying insects being occasionally luminous (in England) is afforded by the facts ... of luminous caterpillars having been within these few years observed for the first time since entomology has been attended to, and that by observers every way competent. If caterpillars so very common as those of _Mamestra oleracea_ may sometimes, though so rarely, be luminous, and if, as Dr Boisduval suggests, and is very probable, this appearance was caused by disease, it is obvious that flying insects may be also occasionally (though seldom) luminous from disease--a supposition which will at once explain the rarity of the occurrence, and the circ.u.mstance that insects of such different genera, and even orders, are said to have exhibited this phenomenon."[156]

These highly curious facts should make observers cautious in strongly denying statements made by others of phenomena, when they themselves have not been so fortunate as to witness them, even though they may think their opportunities to have been as favourable as those of the _soi-disant_ observer.[157]

But we have not yet dismissed Madame Merian. If acquitted of falsehood here, she stands arraigned on a second charge of similar character.

In most tropical countries there are found hideous hairy spiders of monstrous size and most repulsive appearance; short-legged, sombre-hued, ferocious marauders of the night, that by day lurk in obscure retreats under stones, or in burrows in the earth.

Guiana produces a formidable species of this sort (_Mygale avicularia_), which measures three inches in length, and whose feet--though the genus is, as I have said, comparatively short-limbed--cover an area some eight or ten inches in diameter. Madame Merian has exquisitely figured the tragical end of a tiny humming-bird, surprised by one of these monsters on her eggs; the pet.i.te bird overthrown under the fangs of the sprawling spider, one of whose feet is in the nest. It was on the authority of this lady that Linnaeus gave the name of _avicularia_ to the species. Later naturalists have scouted the whole story. Mr MacLeay, who resided in Cuba, says that there are indeed there huge spiders, allied to our garden spider, which make a geometric net, strong enough to embarra.s.s small birds; but that these do not attempt to catch such prey, and never molest birds at all. On the other hand, he avers that the Cuban _Mygale_, an allied species to that of Guiana, makes no web, and has no power of injuring birds. He put this to the test of experiment; for having maimed a humming-bird, he thrust it into the _Mygale's_ hole, which, instead of seizing the victim, retreated as in fear out of his den. This Mr MacLeay supposes to be conclusive; but a moment's reflection will shew how equivocal is the evidence. The spider may not have been hungry; or he may have been taken aback by the sudden intrusion; or he might not choose to take prey that he had not stolen upon and slaughtered _suo more_; or he may have muttered in the Arachnidan language,--

"Timeo Danaos, et dona ferentes."

Because a wolf will cower down in the corner of his lair (even a tiger has been known to do so)--when a man suddenly enters his presence, and will manifest the most abject fear, would it be philosophical to ridicule the tales told of wolves pursuing and devouring men by night?

M. Langsdorff asked the people of Brazil if the Caranquexeira, or the great _Mygale_ of that country, fed upon humming-birds, when they answered him, with bursts of laughter, that it only gratified its maw with large flies, ants, bees, wasps, beetles, &c.; an answer which the traveller verified by his own personal experience.[158] If M. Langsdorff means, which of course he does, that he learned by personal observation that the spider _ordinarily_ feeds on insects, that fact is indubitable, and never has been doubted; but if he means that he had experience that it eats _only_ such prey, which is the question at issue, it is plain that this experience proves no more than that he never witnessed such a fact.

Percival, in his account of Ceylon, observes:--"There is an immense spider here, with legs not less than four inches long, and having the body covered with thick black hair." This was doubtless the _Mygale_ of the island. "The webs which it makes are strong enough to entangle and hold even small birds, which form its usual prey." Alluding to this statement, Sir Emerson Tennent says:--

"As to the stories told of the _Mygale_ catching and killing birds, I am satisfied, both from inquiry and observation, that, at least in Ceylon, they are dest.i.tute of truth, and that (unless in the possible case of acute suffering from hunger) this creature shuns all description of food except soft insects and annelides." And yet he immediately adds:--"A lady at Marandan, near Colombo, told me that she had, on one occasion, seen a little house-lizard (_gecko_) seized and devoured by one of these ugly spiders."[159] Does he not, then, credit his informant? Or are lizards included in the category of "soft insects and annelides?"