Snakes: Curiosities and Wonders of Serpent Life

by Catherine Cooper Hopley

After this, Mr. and Mrs. Mann and their domesticated ophidians held daily receptions. I was invited to see them, and in company with a clerical friend repaired to Chelsea. It was the first family party of snakes I had ever joined, and I must confess to considerable fluctuations of courage as we knocked at the door. Nor could one quite divest oneself of apprehension lest the boa-constrictors to which we were introduced should suddenly make a spring and constrict us into a pulp. But they didn’t. On the contrary, towards ourselves they were disappointingly undemonstrative, and only evinced their consciousness of the presence of strangers by entwining themselves about the members of the family, as if soliciting their protection. They were very jealous of each other, Mr. Mann said; jealous also of other company, as if unwilling to lose their share of attention. There were half-a-dozen or more snakes—viz., several boas, of whom ‘Cleo,’ or Cleopatra, has become historical; two or three lacertine snakes from North Africa; and a common English snake. The smaller ones were regaled on frogs for our special edification. At that time I had never been to the Reptilium at the Zoological Gardens on feeding days, and when Mr. Mann permitted a frog to hop about the table, and we saw the ring snake glide swiftly towards it and catch it in its mouth, we could not comprehend what was to happen next. ‘What will he do with it?’ we both exclaimed. We had not long to wait. Somehow or other the frog, caught by its hind leg, got turned round till its head was in the snake’s mouth and the hind legs were sprawling and kicking, but in vain. Then head-foremost it vanished by degrees into the jaws of the snake; while the head of the latter, ‘poor thing,’ seemed dislocated out of all shape! It was a wonderful but painful sight; for how the snake’s head stretched in that amazing manner, and how the frog was drawn into the mouth, was past our comprehension.

An equally wonderful but far more attractive sight was Mrs. Mann, a graceful and charming little lady in black velvet, with Cleo coiling around her in Laocoon-like curves. The rich colouring of the beautifully-marked reptile entwining the slender form of the woman, the picturesque and caressing actions of Cleo, and the responsive repose of Mrs. Mann as the snake was now round her waist, now undulating around and over her head and neck, was altogether a sight never to be forgotten. Two sweet little children were equally familiar with the other boas, that seemed quite to know who were their friends and play-fellows, for the children handled them and patted and talked to them as we talk to pet birds and cats.

Such were the ‘vipers, cobras, and puff adders’ that had figured in the daily papers.

After this, the reptile house at the Zoological Gardens became a new attraction. From there to the bookshelves and back again to the Gardens, my little book of adventures was discarded for a more ambitious work; but still was confronted by disaffected publishers, whom even the Chelsea snakes failed to convince of public interest.

Friends protested—and still demand—even while I write—‘How can you give your mind to such odious, loathsome, slimy creatures?’ and I boldly reply, ‘In the hope of inducing you to believe that they are not odious and loathsome, and especially not “slimy,” but in the majority graceful, useful, beautiful, wonderful!’ And I invite them to accompany me to the Zoological Gardens, and endeavour there to contemplate a reptile as they look at the other denizens of the Gardens, simply as a member of the wide family of the brute creation, appointed by the Great All-wise to live and feed and enjoy existence as much as the rest, and that have to accomplish the purpose for which they were created equally with the feathered families which we admire and—devour!

And as whatever may be original or novel in this book has been obtained at the Zoological Gardens, I now invite my readers to accompany me in imagination to the Ophidarium, where we may learn how that little ring snake was able to swallow his prodigious mouthful without separating it limb from limb, as a carnivorous mammal would divide the lamb it has killed.

‘But’—you exclaim in horror—‘we do not wish to contemplate so painful, so repulsive a spectacle! How could you, how can you, stand coolly there and see that poor frog tortured and swallowed alive?’

Dear, tender-hearted reader, I did not, I could not, unmoved, contemplate this sight at first; nor for a very long while could I bring myself to watch a living creature being drawn into that living trap. Nor could we—you and I—feel aught but horror in visiting a slaughter-house and watching a poor calf slowly die. Nor could we, for pleasure merely, look coolly on at a painful surgical operation. Yet we know that such things must be. The life of the snake is as important as that of the frog. If we are to talk about cruelty, this book of natural history, and of intended—let me say, of hoped-for—usefulness, would become one of political economy instead. We might discuss the sport of the angler, the huntsman; the affairs of the War Office; of railroad managers and of road-makers; the matters of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; followed by an examination into the questions that have been ventilated in so-called ‘benevolent organs;’ and how some of them employ writers who in every tenth line betray their ignorance of the creatures they attempt to describe. Not even theology could be dispensed with in this work; for, since the time when Adam was told to have ‘dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth,’ the question of ‘cruelty’ has never been satisfactorily solved. Morally and broadly, let us understand it to mean unnecessary torture—pain and suffering that can be avoided, and which offers a very wide scope indeed. In the animal world, ‘every creature is destined to be the food of some other creature;’ and by these economies only is the balance of nature maintained. Happily we are spared the too vivid realization of the destruction of life ceaselessly going on throughout creation; the myriads of insects destroyed each moment by birds, the sufferings inflicted by the feline families and by birds of prey, the countless shoals of the smaller fish devoured—swallowed alive too!—by larger ones, or caught (and not too tenderly) for our own use. These things we dismiss from our minds, and accept as inevitable. We do not ventilate them in daily journals. Nor do we take our children to the slaughter-house or the surgery for their entertainment; or repair thither ourselves for the sake of minutely discussing afterwards the sufferings we have witnessed. You will, I hope, discover that the pain inflicted by the constrictor or the viper is not, after all, so acute as it is by some imagined to be. The venomous bite of the latter causes almost immediate insensibility; the frog which the ring snake ate probably died of suffocation, which also produces insensibility; the constriction of the boa—in its natural condition—produces also a speedy death. Besides, as Dr. Andrew Wilson, in a paper on this subject, has explained to us, the sufferings of a frog or a rat are not like our sufferings. Their brain and nerves are of a lower order.[2]

Permit me, therefore, in the outset, to dismiss from these pages the question of cruelty as not being a branch of zoology; and as we cannot prevent snakes from eating frogs, or the vipers from catching field mice (nor need we wish to do so, or the small quarry would soon become too many for us), let us examine the curious construction of a snake’s head and jaw-bones that enables it to accomplish the task so easily.

With reference to the rapid development of science, it has been said that a scientific work is old as soon as the printer’s ink is dry. Up to the moment of sending my concluding pages to press, I realize this; and remarkably so in the growing interest in the Ophidia. Writings on this subject are becoming so frequent that, while correcting proofs, I am tempted to add footnotes enough almost for another volume.