Thus, when, in February 1873, Professor G. Browne Goode, of Middletown University, Connecticut, invited, through the columns of the American Agriculturist, all the authentic information that could be procured on the question, ‘Do snakes swallow their young?’ he received, as he tells us, no less than 120 testimonies from as many persons in various parts of the United States that single season.
The area in which information was collected included twenty-four States and counties, ‘almost all the evidence being valuable.’
Professor Goode was intending to bring the subject before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to convene at Portland, Maine, the following August; and he spent the summer in collecting information.
At that session of 1873, in the Biological Section of the Association, ‘A Science Convention on Snakes’ was held, and a paper was read by Professor G. Browne Goode, the subject offered for discussion being—‘Do snakes offer a temporary refuge for their young in their throats, whence they emerge when the danger is past?’ On this occasion the chair was occupied by Mr. F. W. Putnam, one of the editors of the American Naturalist, and secretary to the Association. Professor Joseph Lovering was the new President on Professor Lawrence Smith’s retiring; and among those who took part in the discussion were several eminent naturalists New York and other journals published reports of the Convention at the time; and the entire paper by Professor Goode was given to the world in the Annual Reports of the American Association.
From these I will condense the principal matter, quoting also from a paper on the same subject written by F. W. Putnam in vol. ii. of the American Naturalist for 1869. Indeed, the two accounts are so blended that I can only recommend both to the perusal of the interested reader, Professor Goode having reproduced much from Putnam’s paper in the American Naturalist, which, as he informs us, was the first that led him to take an interest in the subject.
He began by reminding his audience that it had long been a popular belief that the young of certain snakes seek a temporary protection from danger by gliding down the open throat of the mother, though it had been of late doubted by so many naturalists as to be classed among the superstitions; but that now a summing up of the evidence would show conclusively that the popular idea is sustained by facts.
The traditions of the North American Indians show that the belief has prevailed with them from prehistoric times. In England also, as he reminded us, as early as the sixteenth century, allusions to it are found in Spencer’s Faerie Queene, 1590, Canto I. vv. 14, 15, 22, 25. From this a word or two only need be quoted regarding the
‘Half serpent, half woman,’
with
‘One thousand young ones sucking upon her poison dugs,’