t 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 _a 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