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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.

Tired, possibly, with sustaining the weight of the rat, he lowered his head, and the rat, finding himself again on terra firma, tried to run away: not so; for the snake, collecting all his force, brought down his erected poison-fangs, making his head tell by its weight in giving vigor to the blow, right on to the body of the rat.

Would you care to bring her to the light of day from the depths of her well? Insert a thin straw into the burrow and move it about. Uneasy as to what is happening above, the recluse hastens to climb up and stops, in a threatening attitude, at some distance from the orifice. You see her eight eyes gleaming like diamonds in the dark; you see her powerful poison-fangs yawning, ready to bite.

Watching her opportunity she caught some of the saliva of the and mixing it with dust, she moulded it into the form of a large serpent, with poison-fangs, and having uttered her spells over it, she left the serpent lying on the path, by which Ra travelled day by day as he went about inspecting Egypt, so that it might strike at him as he passed along.

The patient must first be disarmed and then operated on. And in fact the Calicurgus' sting, aimed from back to front, is driven into the Epeira's mouth, with minute precautions and marked persistency. On the instant, the poison-fangs close lifelessly and the formidable quarry is powerless to harm.

"I wonder how it can look after its tail, it is so far off," said Wynnie. "It does though better than you ladies look after your long dresses. I wonder whether it is descended from creatures that once had feet, and did not make a good use of them. Perhaps they had wings even, and would not use them at all, and so lost them. Its ancestors may have had poison-fangs; it is innocent enough.

The best authorities give an infallible recipe for distinguishing them by the pattern of the colors, but this particular specimen, although it corresponded exactly in color pattern with the description of the poisonous snakes, nevertheless had no poison-fangs that even after the most minute examination we could discover.

I retreated, and it followed, until, springing on to my horse, I left it, greatly surprised at its action, and beginning to think that it must be venomous. Again and again I repeated the experiment, with the same result. And at length I stunned one with a blow of my whip to examine its mouth, but found no poison-fangs in it.

Any highly specialized creature, the higher its specialization, is apt to be proportionately helpless when once its peculiar specialized traits are effectively nullified by an opponent. This is eminently the case with the most dangerous poisonous snakes. In them a highly peculiar specialization has been carried to the highest point. They rely for attack and defence purely on their poison-fangs.

Cobra's poison-fangs, and were meant to end in Mr. Ratel's eyes. They didn't. Old man ratel, he was standing on his hind-legs, with his sturdy paws in front of his eyes like a man who looks across a sunny land and seemed just about to turn a somersault again.