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There were a number of us in the room, including two or three photographers. The doctor first put on the table a non-poisonous but very vicious and truculent colubrine snake. It struck right and left at us. Then the doctor picked it up, opened its mouth, and showed that it had no fangs, and handed it to me.
Unlike the vipers, the colubrine poisonous snakes have small fangs, and their poison, though on the whole even more deadly, has entirely different effects, and owes its deadliness to entirely different qualities. Even within the same family there are wide differences. In the jararaca an extraordinary quantity of yellow venom is spurted from the long poison-fangs.
But the vital difference is that between all these poisons of the pit- vipers and the poisons of the colubrine snakes, such as the cobra and the coral-snake. As yet the doctor has not been able to develop an anti-venom serum which will neutralize the poison of these colubrine snakes.
At all events this kind, the Philodryas aestivus a beautiful and harmless colubrine snake, two and a half to three feet long, marked all over with inky black on a vivid green ground not only emitted a sound when lying undisturbed in his den, but several individuals would hold a conversation together which seemed endless, for I generally fell asleep before it finished.
So numerous were the snakes in that green place that frequently I had as many as a dozen in sight at one time. It looked to me like a coronelia harmless colubrine snakes but was more than twice as large as either of the two species of that genus I was already familiar with.
But some of them, the cobras for instance, develop into what are on the whole perhaps the most formidable of all snakes. The only poisonous colubrine snakes in the New World are the ring- snakes, the coral-snakes of the genus elaps, which are found from the extreme southern United States southward to the Argentine.
The serum that is an antidote as regards the colubrines. The animal that is immune to the bite of one may not be immune to the bite of the other. The bite of a cobra or other colubrine poisonous snake is more painful in its immediate effects than is the bite of one of the big vipers. The victim suffers more.
It is immune to viper poison but it is not immune to colubrine poison. A couple of years ago I was informed of a case where one of these king-snakes was put into an enclosure with an Indian snake- eating cobra or hamadryad of about the same size. It killed the cobra but made no effort to swallow it, and very soon showed the effects of the cobra poison.
I believe it afterward died, but unfortunately I have mislaid my notes and cannot now remember the details of the incident. Doctor Brazil informed me that the mussurama, like the king-snake, was not immune to the colubrine poison.
Yet the old instinct which has made the name of Englishman glorious in the past was there, in the audience before him, and there was "immense cheering," relieved by some slight colubrine demonstrations. Mr. Beecher openly accused certain "important organs" of deliberately darkening the truth and falsifying the facts.
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