Exactly the same thing is told of the North American Rattlesnake. Hunter says, that when alarmed, the young ones, which are eight or ten in number, retreat into the mouth of the parent, and reappear on its giving a contractile muscular token that the danger is past.[148]
M. Palisot de Beauvois asserts that he saw a large rattlesnake which he had disturbed in his walks immediately coil itself up and open its jaws, when in an instant five small ones that were lying by it rushed into its open mouth. He concealed himself, and watched the snake, and in a quarter of an hour saw her discharge them. He then approached a second time, when the young ones rushed into the parent's mouth more quickly than before, and the animal immediately moved off, and escaped. The phenomenon is said to have been observed in regard to some of the venomous snakes of India, but I cannot now refer to details.
Confirmation of a reported fact is sometimes derived from collateral evidence, and such is not wanting in the present case. The phenomenon is not confined to serpents; it has been observed in their near relatives, the lizards. Mr Edward Newman, while guarding the subject with a philosophical caveat, furnishes his readers with the following highly interesting and germane statement:—"1st, My late lamented friend, William Christy, jun., found a fine specimen of the common scaly lizard with two young ones. Taking an interest in everything relating to Natural History, he put them into a small pocket vasculum to bring home; but when he next opened the vasculum the young ones had disappeared, and the belly of the parent was greatly distended; he concluded she had devoured her own offspring; at night the vasculum was laid on a table, and the lizard was therefore at rest: in the morning the young ones had reappeared, and the mother was as lean as at first. 2d, Mr Henry Doubleday, of Epping, supplies the following information:—A person whose name is English, a good observer, and one, as it were, brought up in Natural History, under Mr Doubleday's tuition, once happened to set his foot on a lizard in the forest, and while the lizard was thus held down by his foot, he distinctly saw three young ones run out of her mouth. Struck by such a phenomenon, he killed and opened the old one, and found two other young ones in her stomach, which had been injured when he trod upon her. In both these instances the narrators are of that class who do know what to observe, and how to observe it; and the facts, whatever explanation they may admit, are not to be dismissed as the result of imagination or mistaken observation."[149]
It is remarkable that all the serpents to which the phenomenon is attributed are ovo-viviparous. Our common lizard, to which the facts just narrated doubtless belong (Zootoca vivipara), has the same property, which, however, appears to be by no means common among the Saurian races. This coincidence, while it would afford a handle to the deniers of the stated facts, in the assumption that the emergence of the living young from the abdomen, or their presence within it, has given rise to the notion—may have an essential significance and connexion with the phenomenon itself, on the hypothesis of its truth. That endowment, whatever it be, which enables the young to live and breathe in the abdominal cavity of the mother before birth, may render it easier for them than for others not so endowed to survive a temporary incarceration within the stomach after birth. Mr Newman does not know how to believe that a young and tender animal can remain in the strongly digestive stomach of a viper and receive no injury; but he has forgotten to take into the account the well-ascertained power that living tissues have the power of resisting the action of chemical re-agents that would instantly take effect upon them when dead. The walls of the stomach itself are not corroded by the gastric-juice which is rapidly dissolving the piece of meat within it. If the young animals can do without air for a while in their snug retreat, I do not think they would need fear the digestive operation. Air, I should suppose, must be excluded from the stomach, unless the parent have the power of swallowing air voluntarily, for the emergency; but perhaps a cold-blooded animal like a reptile, with a sluggish circulation and respiration, might do with very much less fresh air than a mammal under similar conditions.
The proposed rationale of those who reject these statements,—that female vipers in the last stage of pregnancy have been opened, and have given freedom to living and active young, and that careless and unscientific observers have leaped to the conclusion that their young must have entered by the mouth,—will not stand before the testimony distinctly given by witnesses, who have actually seen the young retreat into the mouth, and have then found them within the body. No doubt the subject needs further investigation by careful and unprejudiced naturalists; but the positive evidence already adduced on the testimony of so many deponents, warrants our accepting the phenomenon as a normal habit of certain species of Saurians and Ophidians, though it may be somewhat rarely resorted to, and that whatever physical difficulties may seem to stand in the way of its à priori probability—difficulties which perhaps depend on our ignorance, and which will disappear before the light of advancing knowledge.
The entomologists have fallen most ungallantly foul of Madame Merian, a lady who resided in Surinam nearly two hundred years ago, and devoted her attention to the native entomology, painting insects in a very admirable manner. She is set down as a thorough heretic, not at all to be believed, a manufacturer of unsound natural history, an inventor of false facts in science.
Among other things, she speaks of a large hemipterous fly, which has in consequence of her reports been named Fulgora lanternaria. This insect has the head produced into a large inflated proboscis more than an inch in length, which is said to carry an intense luminosity within its transparent walls, as a candle is carried within a lantern. The fair observer says that the first discovery which she made of this property caused her no small alarm. The Indians had brought her several of these insects, which by daylight exhibited no extraordinary appearance, and she enclosed them in a box until she should have an opportunity of drawing them, placing it upon a table in her lodging-room. In the middle of the night the confined insects made such a noise as to awake her, and she opened the box, the inside of which, to her great astonishment, appeared all in a blaze; and in her fright letting it fall, she was not less surprised to see each of the insects apparently on fire. She soon, however, divined the cause of this unexpected phenomenon, and re-enclosed her brilliant guests in their place of confinement. She adds that the light of one of these Fulgoræ is sufficiently bright to read a newspaper by: and though the tale of her having drawn one of these insects by its own light is without foundation, she doubtless might have done so if she had chosen.
This circumstantial and apparently truthful statement has brought no small odium on the fair narrator. Other naturalists who have had opportunities of seeing the insect in its native regions strongly deny its luminosity. The inhabitants of Cayenne, according to the French Dictionnaire d'Histoire Naturelle, aver that it does not shine at all; and this is confirmed by M. Richard, a naturalist, who reared the species. The learned and accurate Count Hoffmansegg states that his insect collector Herr Sieber, a practised entomologist of thirty years' experience, who during a sojourn of several years in Brazil took many specimens of the Fulgora lanternaria, never saw a single one which was in the slightest degree luminous. There is a kindred species in China, F. candelaria, very common in those glazed boxes of insects which the Chinese sell to mariners; this also has been supposed to emit light, but Dr Cantor assures us that he has never observed the least luminosity in this species.
Thus it would seem that the obloquy which has fallen upon the ingenious lady is not altogether undeserved, and that for the sake of a telling story, she has been indeed "telling a story." But we may imagine her offended ghost looking round and saying, "All these gentlemen merely say they have not seen the light; now I say I have: is there no one who will verify my statement?"