C. Mansfield Ingleby.
Birmingham.
It would be well if every popular error were hunted down, as your correspondents have done in the case of the snake-vomiting at Portsmouth. The public need to be told, that no animal can live in the alimentary canal but the parasites which belong to that part of the animal economy. Of these the Lumbricus intestinalis is the largest, and is discharged by children even of the size mentioned in the case of Jonathan Smith.
Two years ago I met with a curious illustration of the popular ignorance of that branch of natural history which treats of our own reptiles, as well as of the mode of growth of a popular marvel. During the hot weather of the summer before last, I was asked by a respectable farmer, if I had seen the "serpent" which was lately killed in an adjoining parish. "Serpent!" I replied; "I suppose you mean some overgrown common snake—perhaps a female full of eggs?" "Well, it might have been a snake at first, but it was grown into a serpent; and pursued a boy through the hedge, but was fortunately encountered and killed by the father."
It is a moot point, whether the parasites of animals are engendered or not within the body. In the case of the bots of horses, they are known to be the larvæ of a fly which deposits its eggs on the skin; from whence they are licked off, and conveyed into the animal's stomach, where they are hatched and prepared for their other metamorphoses.
I believe the only parasite taken in with water in tropical climates is the Guinea Worm; an animal which burrows under the skin of the arms or legs, and is extremely difficult of extraction, and often productive of great inconvenience. But whether the egg of this worm be taken into the stomach, and conveyed by the blood into the limbs, there to be hatched into life, or whether it enter through the pores of the skin, I believe is not determined.
The popular delusion respecting the swallowing of young snakes, and of their continuance in the stomach, is a very old one, and is still frequent. A medical friend of mine, not long since, was called on to treat a poor hysterical woman, who had exhausted the skill of many medical men (as she asserted) to rid her of "a snake or some such living creature, which she felt confident was and had been for a long time gnawing in her stomach." I suggested the expediency of working on the imagination of this poor hypochondriac, as was done in the well-known facetious story of the man who fancied he had swallowed a cobbler; and who was cured by the apparent discharge first of the awls and strap, then of the lapstone, and, finally, of Crispin himself.
M. (2)