SERPENTES

Serpents. Serpents strike mankind, and other animals, with such terror upon account of their poison and some singular properties which elude all the distinction of our judgment, that their unexpected approach alarms even the most determined courage. Among the amphibia serpentes we find some genera endowed with a very singular quality, whereby they differ from all others: the greater part of them live indifferently by land or water, many of them for one half the year sleep in their winter-quarters to all appearance dead: their respiration differs very much from that of birds and the Mammalia; they draw in air without any reciprocal expiration, at least a sensible one: their bodies are of a very rigid nature, abounding with blood, which possesses a very small degree of heat: the organs of generation in the male are double; a singularity occurring in no other animal, unless perhaps a few insects: their natural sounds are hoarse, their aspects ugly, their smell fetid. Some of them are oviparous, others viviparous; and by their having cartilaginous bones, every spring they shake off their old age in the manner of the crab; so that there is no definitive bound to their increase and magnitude. Their singular mode of taking their prey also deserves to be mentioned: being destitute of feet, and consequently not able to pursue it, they lie hidden under the cover of large stones and the roots of trees, and darting forward with a sudden spring upon any animal which passes by, seize and devour it. Travellers into India inform us, that the BOA constrictor, the greatest of all serpents, lies in ambush among shrubs, and seizing hares, flags, and other animals, suffocates them by rolling himself round them, and then covering them with his saliva, swallows them. These animals, as they very seldom happen of capture, and beside are not furnished with real and proper grinding teeth, have not their jaw-bones jointed with the same articulation as other animals, but only connected at the base with a ligament; so that by expanding them they are able to devour the body of an animal of twice their thickness, or even more: Thus Cleijer relates, that the boa of Java will devour a whole buffalo, and other travellers affirm that he is able to swallow a stag. Our own vipers are frequently seen with their bellies greatly swelled out; and being dissected, they will be found to contain a frog or a mouse. A writer in the American Academy, informs us, that he once discovered seven young birds in the stomach of a viper. The American rattlesnake is the most indolent of all the serpents: As he lies under the shade of a tree, opening his jaws a little, he fixes his eyes, which glitter very brightly upon any bird or squirrel which is in it: they are endowed with a wonderful power of fascination; the squirrel utters a mournful and feeble cry, and, as if foreseeing his fate, leaps from bough to bough on every side, seemingly to attempt a sudden escape; but struck with an unknown species of fascination, he comes down from the tree, and flings himself with a spring into the very jaws of his enemy. A mouse, having been shut up with one of these fascinating rattlesnakes in an iron box, the mouse sat in one corner, and the rattle-snake was opposite to it; and fixing his his eyes continually upon it, by his look alone it was at last forced to fling itself into the mouth of the serpent. The same experiment was repeated in Italy with a pregnant female viper with the same success; and do we not see in the summer a parallel instance at home in the toad, a most indolent animal, into whose mouth, as it lies in the shade or under a shrub, butterflies and other insects fly? Weapons. No subject has excited more philosophical controversy than the poison of serpents, with regard to its nature and mode of operating. Antiquity has not been sparing in conjecture and fiction upon this subject, and its errors have been retained with the most reverential obstinacy by the vulgar: among these we are to reckon the fictitious ring fixed in the tail of the serpent, as the painters sometimes have groundlessly enough represented it; some have invented a similar fiction of a black forked tongue, which the serpent vibrates on both sides, and have ascribed its power of producing such noxious effect to this; while others, affixing an air of superior discernment, have, upon equally good reasons, ascribed it to the teeth in general: these are all errors of a magnitude that the most desultory attention to the subject would have been sufficient to have removed. There is a very small bone closely fixed to the upper jaw, in the inside of the lip of a poisonous serpent, which has a power of moving backward or forward; to this two or three fangs are annexed larger than the teeth, which the serpent, by its assistance, when enraged, darts forward, or withdraws and conceals at his pleasure, in a similar manner to the claws of a cat: these fangs, which the common people name the large teeth of the serpent, are excellently described by Tyson, in the anatomy of the rattlesnake, which he has given in the Philosophical Transactions. "In these (the fangs) we observed a considerable cavity near the base; and near the point a very discernible fissure of some length like the slit of a pen: the part of the tooth from the fissure to the root was manifestly channelled, which we first discovered by lightly pressing the gums; we then saw the poison ascend through the cavity of the fang and flow out of the fissure; and as these fangs are so very acute, so firm and solid toward the point (the fissure being on the external and convex, not the internal side), nothing could be conceived more convenient either for inflicting a wound, or to insure the infusion of the poison." Each of the fangs is surrounded with a vesicle furnished with glands secreting a certain fluid; which, upon the vesicle being pressed, seems to flow out of the point of the fang. The serpent when incensed, raising his head, extends the small bone armed with the fangs mentioned above; and attacking his enemy with a force combined of the weight of his body and the action of the muscles, he wounds him with the expanded fangs, and the vesicle being compressed the poison immediately flows into the wound: this is clear from the experience of those who, having broken off their fangs with a pair of forceps, handled the serpent thus disarmed without any hurt. And as the North American, after carefully extracting these venomous fangs, suffer the rattlesnake to bite and gnaw them with his teeth till the blood flows freely, with total impunity; it is certain those people are deceived who attribute the fatal effects of his bite to those hurtless weapons. Poison. Antiquity amused itself with a fable destitute of all appearance of truth, that anger was excited by black bile: they applied this fiction without hesitation to the present subject, and founded an hypothesis upon it to account for the effects of the bite of an incensed serpent; pretending to have discovered an ideal canal which conducted the bile from its vesicle to the mouth of the serpent, whence it flowed into the part bitten, and produced the most fatal symptoms. But toward the end of the last century, this subject was greatly illustrated under the auspices of Ferdinand the Second, Great Duke of Tuscany: This prince, desirous of inquiring into that mysterious question, the nature of serpents, invited Steno, Rhedi, and some other philosophers of the first eminence, to his court; and a multitude of the most poisonous serpents being collected, Rhedi made several experiments upon them, which discovered to him a number of particulars before unknown; of which the following seem to have the best claim to our attention. When he either caused a living viper to bite a dog, or wounded him with the teeth of one newly dead (the poisonous vesicle remaining unbroken), the event was the same. If the bite was repeated, its effect became weaker, and at last was lost, the poison contained in the vesicle being totally exhausted. That the teeth of serpents, when extended to bite, were moistened over with a certain liquor; and when the vesicle at the base was pressed, a drop of poison flowed to the point of the fang. When the poison thus flowing from the vesicle was received in soft bread or a sponge, an animal bitten by the serpent received no more harm from the wound than from being pricked by a needle, till after a few days, when the venom was restored afresh: but when an animal was wounded with the point of a needle dipped in the poison, it was tormented with the same pains as if it had been bitten by the viper itself. Preserving some of this poison in a glass, and totally evaporating the moisture in the sun, when the residuum was diluted again with water, and the point of a needle dipped in the solution, Rhedi found to his great surprise that it had the same effect as when recent. But the boldness of Tozzi, one who charmed vipers, flung all these men who were deeply versed in natural philosophy into the utmost astonishment; they happening to fall into discourse (while the prince was present) upon the certain death which would attend any person's swallowing this poison of the viper by mistake, instead of spirit of wine or water; Tozzi, confiding in his art, drank a considerable portion of it without hesitation: they were all astonished at his apparent rashness, and predicted instant death to the man; however, he escaped as safely as if he had drunk only so much water. This event, which struck the prince and his illustrious associates in these philosophical inquiries by its novelty, was well known to the ancients. Lucan, in the 9th book of the Pharsalia, speaking of the serpent, says, Noxia serpentum est admisto sanguine pestisMorsu virus habent, et fatum dente minantur,Pecula morte carent. Phar. l. 9. v. 614. Mixed with the blood that venom flays alone,His bite is poison, death is in his fang;Yet is the draught innocuous. Nor must we omit observing, that barbarous nations are perfectly acquainted with the property of the poison of serpents by which it retains its deadly power after it has been long kept: they have been possessed of this fatal secret for ages past; it being their custom to tinge the points of their arrows with the juice of spurge, putrid flesh, or oil of tobacco, but more particularly with the poison of vipers. Some modern Indians continue the practice to this day; and we have the testimony of Pliny, in his Natural History, that the Scythians had long ago the same custom: "The Scythians (says that author) dip their arrows in the poison of vipers and human blood; a horrid practice, as the slightest wound inflicted by one of them desies all the art of medicine." While Rhedi and his associates were thus busied in Tuscany in tracing the footsteps of nature closely and and successfully under the guidance of experiment, the philosophers of other countries amused themselves with forming new conjectures and fictions. In France, Moses Charas, first surgeon to the king, a man of considerable reputation, writing upon the theory of serpents, endeavoured with all his weight to prove their poison "to consist in heated animal-spirits, and therefore that it is impossible for a viper to give a deadly wound unless it had been before incensed." We shall not go about to deny, that the mental affections can generate something similar to a poison. The face of a man in anger, changed to a sublivid colour, indicates something like it: men struck with a sudden terror frequently turn pale, and the humours lodged in the intestinal canal are evacuated by a diarrhoea. But this is evidently discovered in nurses, whose milk becomes poisonous when they are greatly irritated; and if it be then taken by a child, provokes a diarrhoea, which frequently terminates fatally. But however this may be, the hypothesis of Charas can receive but little support from it; as that vague doctrine of animal spirits and their irritation, however it might afford a commodious and decent retreat to ignorance formerly, is now suffered to subside in a very undisturbed oblivion. Bite. The symptoms that attend the bite of the viper are a smarting in the part wounded, as if it were continually pricked with needles; swelling, paleness, snapping of the eyes, tears, horror with coldness; a weak pulse, afterwards becoming unequal; thirst, cold sweat, pain in the reins, diarrhoea with griping and vomiting, difficulty of breathing, drowsiness, and convulsions which terminate in death. We are ignorant of what species the hemorrhoids was, which is described by Lucan as causing by its bite a flux of blood from every part of the body. But the bite of an American serpent named de la crax kills in the same manner. The dipsasias is at present likewise unknown. Lucan informs us, that the person wounded by it was attacked by an unquenchable thirst. This is finely painted by him; where A. Tuseus, standard-bearer of Cato, is described as bitten by that serpent: Non decus imperii, non musti jura CatonisArdentem tenuere virum, quin spargere signaAuderet, totisque furoris exquireret agrisQuas posebat aquas sitionis in corde venenum. Pharsal. 1. 9. His wild impatience, not his honoured state,Nor sorrowing Cato's high command, restrain;Furious, dishonoured in the dust, he flings His sacred eagle, and o'er all the fieldsRapid he bursts to seek the cooling stream,To quench the thirsty poison in his breast. And a few verses after: Serutatur venas penitus squalentis arenaNunc redit ad Syrtis, et fluctus accipit ore,Aquoreasque placet, sed non sibi sufficit humor,Nec sentit fatique genus, mortemque veneni,Sed putat esse sitim; ferreque aperire tumentesSussinit venas, atque os implere cruore. Now tearing up the sands, some latent veinFrustrate he seeks: now to the Syrtis shoreReturn'd, he swallows down the briny floodMixed with its rolling sands; nor knows his fateAnd the sad poison's death, but calls it thirst;Then with his sword opens his spouting veins,And drinks the bursting blood.— In the monuments of antiquity we find three species of asps. 1. The phytas, with a callous caruncle on its forehead: its colour is cinereous, with a shining green. 2. The cherlea, is very long, cinereous, inclining to green; its eyes red. 3. The chelidonia is black, with a white belly: its bite is said to produce two or three hiccoughs, change of colour, stupor, cold, and sleep with palpitation. Upon a comparison of what these authors have written upon these asps, it seems probable that the phytas, which kills by bringing on a lethargic sleepiness, is the same serpent which obtained the specific name of the aspis among the ancients, and that it is the nintipolonga Zeylanica of Bellonius and Ray, and the Amodytes of Linnæus. The phytas seems to have been the serpent made use of by Cleopatra to destroy herself. This woman, to terminate a dissipated life with an easy death, ordered her physicians to prepare a poison for her which might best effect this purpose. They having tried a number of different experiments upon condemned criminals, at last discovered this species of asp, which brings on death without any previous appearance of distemper or hiccough: the face seems in a slight perspiration, an easy insensibility and lethargy creeps upon the whole frame, and the person bitten seems almost totally ignorant of his approaching dissolution. Having acquainted the queen with their discovery, she applied the asp either to her bosom or her arms; or, according to some authors, dipping the point of a needle in the poison, and pricking herself with it, she expired in an easy sleep. Most of the colubri are poisonous, and perhaps all the crotali: among these are reckoned Vipera, Mycterizans, Berus, Leberis, Lebetinus, Prester, or black viper, Naja, Stolatus, Dipsas, Niveus, Atropos, Amodytes, Cherlea, Aspis, Severus, Lacteus, Atrox, Corallinus. The bite of the naja is so fatal, that a man dies by it in the space of an hour, his flesh entirely falling off his bones in a semi-dissolved putrid state: this makes it probable that it is the same serpent which the ancients named the sepe. It is not necessary to enumerate rate any more, though a number of different species might be mentioned whose poisons all produced different effects: yet with this diversity, according to Rhedi, they all agree in one particular circumstance, that their venom is not fatal unless introduced into the blood externally. The experiments of Rhedi have not, however, in the opinion of some celebrated philosophers, so far cleared the theory of the operation of the poison of the viper, as to leave nothing further to be desired upon that subject. Fontana and Carminati have endeavoured to investigate its operations more clearly. Carminati, from eleven experiments, deduces the following conclusions. 1. That if poison be instilled into a nerve, the animal wounded dies almost instantly; and the whole nervous system, to which it is rapidly conveyed, is deprived of its quality called sensibility. 2. If a muscle be wounded, it is deprived of its irritability. This is confirmed by the experiments of Fontana. 3. The poison injected into a wounded muscle or tendon is considerably longer in killing an animal than that introduced into a nerve. 4. The symptoms which precede the death of the animal bitten are, a stupor, lethargy, tremors, convulsions, paralysis of the legs (part wounded), entire dissolution of the limbs. The blood is not always coagulated, nor its crasis dissolved. Marks of inflammation are sometimes discovered in certain parts of the animal after death, sometimes not: these are the effects of spasms and convulsions, not of the poison. 5. Not the least sign of the jaundice was discoverable in the eyes of any of the animals upon which Carminati made his experiments. 6. The stomach in every one of them was very much inflated; a symptom remarked only by Fallopius and Albertini. 7. A ligature applied instantly above the part bitten, if it be so placed as to admit one, was found by some experiments a good preventative against the diffusion of the poison: its compression should be considerable, but not excessive. Cure. It would be endless to attempt to relate all those antidotes which men, compelled by so fatal a necessity, have employed against the bite of serpents. We shall confine ourselves only to such as are recommended by the probability of use. The first in point of antiquity, and which recommends itself also to us by its certainty, is to draw the venom out of the wounded part as quickly as possible. This has been attempted by different methods. The most ancient is sucking it out by the mouth; yet the utmost precaution is necessary in the person who performs this operation, that his mouth be perfectly free from the seury, and that the skin of the fauces be entirely unbroken; lest he should incur an equal hazard, or perhaps a greater, as the poison must attack a nobler part. Therefore, as the operation is nauseous and full of danger, it will be better to scarify the part with the knife, that the infected blood may have a freer exit from the opened mouths of the vessels, and to apply a large cupping-glass, by means of which the remaining venom may be extracted; then to foment the part with warm emollient applications, joined with some spirit, as the spirit of sal ammoniac or theriacum; if these be not at hand, apply soap and vinegar to the wound: the patient may take sudorific and exciting medicines internally, by which is meant emetics or ipecacuanha; and the stronger sudorifics are exhibited with great success. But the present age has added antidotes of three different species to counteract the most vehement effects of this poison, of which Europe, America, and Asia, has each furnished us with one. 1. Among the Europeans, there has been a strong predilection in favour of the oil of olives, or any other expressed oil: this is directed to be drunk plentifully by the patient, to the quantity of half a pound or more, while the wounded part is copiously bathed by it. Very full accounts of the happy effects of this treatment are inserted in the Philosophical Transactions of London, and the Memoirs of the Academy of Paris. We are so far from detracting from the merits of this medicine, that we think it specific against the bite of the common and black viper; yet we must add, that the nature of this antidote is not yet thoroughly investigated and understood, and that we dare not pronounce sentence upon its efficacy and use in every single and particular case. Linnaeus, being in Scania, was applied to by a woman who was bitten by the cherca; and notwithstanding he caused her to drink this oil according to the prescribed forms, she nevertheless expired in the greatest agonies. May not this oil fail when applied against the bite of some of the European species of serpents? or is there not some necessary observations omitted in the formula delivered, either respecting the medicine or the patient? This we leave and strongly recommend to the experience of others to determine. 2. Let us now proceed to the American antidotes; of which the powder of the fenega root deservedly claims the first place. The use of this root has been known to the natives of the woods of North America for many ages past. Its effects against the bite of the rattlesnake almost exceed all belief; but the invidious prejudices of those barbarians preserved this secret with so obstinate a silence, that no bribe could purchase it from them, until Tennent happily discovered and published it for the benefit of mankind. He tells us, that the root of the polygala fenega never fails of success unless where some large vessel is wounded, when the medicine has not time to counteract the rapid progress of the violence of the poison. Upon this subject the reader may consult the Dissertation upon this plant in the second volume of the Americanæ Academiceæ. A maid-servant at Upsal was bitten by a serpent upon a very dangerous place. The most dreadful symptoms followed the bite, and such as demanded the application of the most decisive remedies. Two doses of the powder of this root was attended with so good an effect, that in two days she was almost completely recovered. Beside this root, the Americans have many other plants which they apply upon the same occasion; as the eryngium foetidum, or American fetid eryngo; aquaticum, or Virginian aquatic ditto; veratrum luteum, or Virginian yellow-flowered veratrum; aletris farinosa, or floridan aletris; uvularia perfoliata, or Virginian perfoliate uvula; sanicula canadensis, or Canadian sanicle; and the aristolochia serpentina, or Virginian snake-root: but we shall dismiss these, with a long catalogue of others whose virtues are not yet well known to us. 3. We come now to another antidote of equal celebrity, that made use of by the Asiatics, which is of the greatest antiquity among the Indians, the ophiorrhiza mungos, or Indian ophiorrhiza. Kœmpfer has given us the history of this plant and its unequalled virtues against the bite of the coluber najas, or cobra di capello. We shall only hint, that as the efficacy of this medicine is so great, it would be much safer to introduce that, or the true lignum colubrinum, instead of the strychnos colubrina, or Indian strychnos, into general practice, whose use, if it have any, is extremely ambiguous. The snake-stone, called the pedra de cobras di capello (as if it were a stone extracted from the head of the coluber naja) is very famous throughout all India, and is extolled by Garzia, Kircher, and others, as a specific against the bite of serpents. It is pretended, that if it be applied to a poisoned wound, and suffered to remain upon it until it fall off of itself, that it will extract all the venom. But its use has been suspected by many; nor did it succeed with Rhedi, who tried a variety of experiments with it. Many have been of opinion that the stone is artificial, and nothing more than the calcined horn of a hart. See PSYLLI, (Encycl.)