Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent Life

by Catherine Cooper Hopley

CHAPTER VI.

THE TONGUE OF A SNAKE.

PART II.—WHAT IT IS.

IF only by the law of compensation, another chapter must be devoted to the innocent tongue of a snake. It has been an object of hatred and aversion for untold ages, and the misrepresentation of it, and the abuse of it, would fill many chapters. Were it endowed with speech, and the words of St. James applied to it,—‘the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity,’—no stronger animosity could be displayed.

Happily, this animosity is by degrees dying away; but only by degrees, as we have seen, some writers during the last twenty years having been undergoing a sort of transition state with regard to the use of the tongue, inasmuch as, while they have arrived at the conviction that it does not ‘sting,’ they are not yet quite clear as to what it does do. Some few have even clung to the lubrication theory. Popular writers, to speak more correctly, not scientific ones. Still, it is the popular writers who most influence the casual reader. To satisfy a passing interest, we turn to these, to the books they quote, and next to encyclopedias, and not to scientific text-books, where we are beset by technicalities which are in themselves a study to be first mastered. Otherwise, from scientific works a good deal might have been learned long ago about this exceedingly wonderful organ, the tongue of a snake.

It is evident, however, that a good many of our drawing-room naturalists have not thought it necessary to first devote themselves to the scientific study of a snake’s tongue before they ventured to write about it; therefore they remained only partially enlightened. To such an extent has the supposed ‘lubrication’ prevailed, that ophiologists of the day have not thought it too trivial to speak of and to refute. The same visitors to the Zoological Gardens who tell their friends or children to look at the snake’s ‘sting,’ also wait to ‘see the snake lick the rabbit all over before it begins to swallow it.’

Were a painter to set to work to paint a house, or a mason to whitewash the ceiling, with a camel’s-hair pencil, it would not be a more tedious and impossible process than that of a snake ‘licking all over with its tongue’ the body of the animal it is about to devour. Illustrations, in order to be as startling as possible, and to feed the educated horror of snakes, often represent a boa or an anaconda coiled round a bull or some other equally large and rough-coated animal, which, as the writer informs us, ‘it was seen to lick all over and cover with its mucus.’

Let the reader reflect a moment, and he will perceive what supply of moisture this degree of lubrication would demand. Even were the snake’s whole body furnished with salivary glands, and were it provided with a broad, flat tongue to work with, what must the rate of secretion be to enable the snake to go through such a task, and to enable it to perform it in a period of time in which a spectator (supposing he had sufficient powers of endurance) could stand by and watch the process!

Snakes are, it is true, supplied very abundantly with a mucous saliva. Describing the mode of swallowing, Dr. Günther says: ‘But for the quantity of saliva discharged over the body of the prey, deglutition would be slow.’ Slow in comparison with the feeding of other animals it is, under any circumstances, and it would be painfully tedious, almost impossible, for the unfortunate reptile to feed at all, were its difficulties not relieved by this ‘abundant supply’ of saliva. But this is not saying that the tongue performs any office in systematic lubrication. It simply means that the mouth of the hungry snake ‘waters’ over its food, and waters far more freely than is the usual case with other animals. We ourselves know something of this stimulation of the salivary glands at the sight or smell of food when we are hungry; but snakes are beneficently provided with the salivary apparatus (described in the first chapter), and the mouth waters over its prey, as much when the tongue is in its sheath as when the tongue is engaged in its own peculiar and distinct functions. What the spectator does see is this tongue fulfilling its office of feeling, examining, exploring, investigating, ascertaining whether the prey is thoroughly dead, and the best way of setting to work on the great task of swallowing the huge, rough mass. All this work the tongue does for its owner; and we shall, as I hope, see before we have done with it, that so far from exciting our hatred and disgust, there is perhaps no other feature or organ belonging to the helpless snake so important to it, so worthy of our own observation and admiration, as this much-abused tongue.