"The rattlesnake has two fangs, which are concealed in a sheath, one at each side of the upper jaw. They are curved in their shape, and their point is as sharp as that of a common needle. They are hollow in the center, and the roots of the fangs are connected with the poison bags. These reptiles generally use only one fang at a time, and when they do use it, they seize with their mouth the part which they intend to poison, then perforate it deeply with the fang. At this moment the bag contracts, and the deleterious fluid, which has such an enmity to the blood, is injected into the very bottom of the wound, through a small aperture in the under part of the fang, at a short distance from the sharp point. Having effected his purpose, he withdraws the instrument, and leaves his victim to his fate. He does not seem to feel pain at the moment, and generally for the first five minutes he appears to be perfectly well. At the end of this period, however, the ears begin to droop; he seems giddy and uneasy; the lower extremities soon lose their power; he falls on the ground; the pupils dilate; slight convulsions come on; and the animal dies, generally, in about fifteen minutes from the time that the poison had been injected into the wound. When we examine the part immediately after death, we find that the poison has completely destroyed the red color of the blood; and not only of this, but for two inches all round the puncture, the muscular fibers, and even the cellular substance, are as black as if they had been for hours in a state of complete mortification. When the muriate of soda (common salt) is immediately applied to the wound, it is a complete antidote. When an Indian is bitten by a snake, he applies a ligature above the part, and scarifies the wound to the very bottom; he then stuffs it with common salt, and after this it soon heals, without producing any effect on the general system. (The ligature may be the efficacious remedy, intercepting the current of blood to the heart, and consequently preventing the action of the poison upon that vital organ.) A rabbit, under the influence of the rattlesnake poison, has been seen to drink a saturated solution of muriate of soda and soon recover, while healthy rabbits would not taste a drop of the same saline water."—Stevens's Observations on the Properties of the Blood, p. 137, 315.
"I was with the Hon. Esquire Boyle when he made certain experiments of curing the bite of vipers with certain East India snake-stones, that were sent him by King James II., purposely to have him try their virtue and efficacy. For that end he got some brisk vipers, and made them bite certain pullets; he applied nothing to one of the pullets, and it died within three minutes and a half; but I think they all recovered to whom he applied the snake-stones, though they turned wonderful pale, their combs drooped immediately, and the next morning all their flesh was turned green to a wonder; nevertheless, they recovered by degrees."—Miscellanea Curiosa, vol. iii., p. 345.
No. XLI.
"It is an unquestionable fact, that the copper-colored man can not endure the spread of European civilization in his neighborhood, but perishes in its atmosphere, without suffering from ardent spirits, epidemics, or war, as if touched by a poisonous breath." Thus writes Mr. Poeppig, a German naturalist, who has resided for some years in South America; and he proceeds to compare the substitution of the one race for the other, with the destruction of the first growth of low vegetation in the recently-formed islands of the Pacific by the vigorous crop of forest trees which succeeds it.—Encyclopædia of Erz and Gruber, art. Indici.
Thus also writes the philosophical traveler, Mr. Darwin: "Besides several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be some more mysterious agency at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we shall find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer. The Polynesian of Malay extraction has, in parts of the East Indian Archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-colored native. The varieties of man seem to act upon each other in the same way as different species of animals, the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine, energetic natives saying, 'They knew the land was doomed to pass from their children.'"
Sir Richard Bourke writes thus to Lord Glenelg respecting New Zealand (1837): "Disease and death prevail even among those natives who, by their adherence to the missionaries, have received only benefit from the English connection, and even the very children, who are reared under the care of the missionaries, are swept off in a ratio which promises, at no very distant period, to leave the country destitute of a single aboriginal inhabitant. The natives are perfectly sensible of this decrease, and when they contrast their own condition with that of the English families, they conceive that the God of the English is removing the aboriginal inhabitants to make room for them; and it appears to me that this impression has produced among them a very general unhappiness and indifference to life."
Sir Francis Head justified the sweeping measures of removal[227] contemplated during his administration of Canada, by asserting his belief in the same mysterious certainty of the aboriginals' extirpation. "We may as well endeavor to make the setting sun stand still on the summit of the Rocky Mountains, as attempt to arrest the final extermination of the Indian race."—See Merivale's Lectures on Colonization, No. 19 (delivered before the University of Oxford in 1839, 1840, and 1841), in which he objects to the truth of the facts on which the above statements are founded, in so far as they are supposed to involve any mysterious influence of the white over the copper-colored races. "Perhaps I may venture to attribute some of the coloring (of the foregoing statements) to that taste for fanciful analogies, and speculations partaking of the mysterious, in which natural philosophers are apt to indulge when they apply their knowledge to subjects not immediately within their province. When we find one race of animals, or one class of vegetation, extirpating another, there is nothing inexplicable in the succession of cause and effect. The stronger destroys the weaker by natural agencies: animals become the prey of newly-imported indigenous ones, or their food is destroyed by the multiplication of the latter: the seeds of one class of vegetables can not spring where a stronger growth has established itself, and so forth. What is there in these or similar processes analogous to the supposed mysterious influence of the mere contact of one family of the human race upon another? If it be true that the mere presence of a white population is sufficient to cause the Red Indians or the Polynesians to dwindle and decay, without any assignable agency of the one or the other, it must be confessed that this is an anomaly in the laws of Providence utterly unexplained by all our previous knowledge, wholly at variance with all the other laws by which animal life and human society are governed."—Vol. ii., p. 206.
FOOTNOTES:
[227] Three millions of fertile acres were to be resumed; several thousand Indians were persuaded to relinquish them, and migrate to a large island (Manitoulin) on Lake Huron. "The greatest kindness," says Sir F. Head, "which we can perform to these intelligent and simple-minded people, is to remove and fortify them as much as possible from all communication with the whites."—Returns, 1839, p. 145. These are nearly the same arguments which have uniformly been urged in the United States, and would justify incessant acts of arbitrary removal, such as would render all improvement impossible.
No. XLII.