The end of this python was remarkable and pathetic. Mr. Severn tells me that some years after he had published the above letter Mr. Mann was seized with an apoplectic fit. His wife, being the only other person in the house at the time, ran out to fetch a doctor. She was absent about ten minutes, and on returning found that the serpent during her absence had crawled upstairs from the room below into that where her husband was lying, and was stretched beside him dead. Such being the fact, we are left to speculate whether the double seizure of the man and the snake was a mere coincidence, or whether the sight of its stricken master, acting on the emotions of a possibly not healthy animal, precipitated its death. Looking to the extreme suddenness of the latter, as well as to the fact of the animal having pined so greatly for his friends while it was confined at the Zoological Gardens, I think the probability rather points to the death of the animal having been accelerated by emotional shock. But of course the question is an open one.
So much for the power of reptiles to establish such definite and complete associations as are required for the recognition of persons—associations, however, to which, as we have seen, frogs, and even insects may attain. As for other associations, a correspondent writes to me:—
I believe tortoises are able to establish a definite association between particular colours on a flat surface and food. Only the day before reading your article on animal intelligence I noticed the endeavours of a small tortoise to eat the yellow flowers of an inlaid writing-table, and I have often remarked the same recognition with regard to red.
Lord Monboddo relates the following anecdote of a serpent:—
I am well informed of a tame serpent in the East Indies, which belonged to the late Dr. Vigot, and was kept by him in the suburbs of Madras. This serpent was taken by the French, when they invested Madras in the late war, and was carried to Pondicherry in a close carriage. But from thence he found his way back again to his old quarters, which it seems he liked better, though Madras is distant from Pondicherry about one hundred miles. This information, he adds, I have from a lady who then was in India, and had seen the serpent often before his journey and after his return.
Considering the enormous distances over which turtles are able to find their way in the season of migration, this display of the homing faculty to so great a degree in a serpent is not to be regarded as incredible.
Mr. E. L. Layard, in his 'Rambles in Ceylon' says of the cobra:[141]—
I once watched one which had thrust its head through a narrow aperture and swallowed one (i.e. a toad). With this encumbrance he could not withdraw himself. Finding this, he reluctantly disgorged the precious morsel, which began to move off. This was too much for snake philosophy to bear, and the toad was again seized; and again, after violent efforts to escape, was the snake compelled to part with it. This time, however, a lesson had been learnt, and the toad was seized by one leg, withdrawn, and then swallowed in triumph.
Mr. E. C. Buck, B.C.S., says in 'Nature' (vol. viii., p. 303):—