conceivable
motive for falsely asserting that the dog was his, I can only assume that
the animal had strayed away and joined the pack of wild dogs.

There is no reward for killing wild dogs in Mysore, as is the case in the
Madras Presidency, and I should strongly advise that one should be given,
as from the great destruction of the game, on which they at present live,
these animals will soon become very destructive to cattle, and possibly,
or even probably, dangerous to man. And it is the more important to attend
to this matter at once, because I find, from Jerdon's "Mammals of India,"
that the bitch has at least six whelps at a birth, and he mentions that
Mr. Elliot (the late Sir Walter) remarks that the wild dog was not known
in the Southern Maharatta country until of late years, but that it was now
very common; and he adds that he once captured a bitch and seven cubs, and
had them alive for some time. No one has any interest in killing these
jungle dogs, and until a reward is offered for their destruction, they
will go on increasing at an alarming rate.

I now pass on to offer some remarks on snakes, and especially on the great
number of deaths said to be caused by them, and I say said to be caused by
them, because I have good reason to suppose that the immense number of
deaths (sometimes returned at 17,000 or 18,000 for all India) reported as
being caused by them, are really poisoning cases which are falsely
returned as being due to snake bite. When mentioning this surmise on
board of a P. and O. ship to two civilians, they demurred to the idea, and
I then asked them if they had ever known within their own cognizance of a
man being killed by a snake--i.e., either seen a man fatally bitten, or
who had been fatally bitten. They never had, and that too during a service
of about twenty-four years. I then, out of curiosity, made inquiries
through all the first-class passengers, and at last met with one lady who
had a gardener who had been killed by a snake. I also got my English
servant to make a similar inquiry in the second-class, and no passenger
there had known of a case, though one of them had been engaged in
surveying operations for ten years. My attention has been particularly
called to this subject in consequence of my own long experience, which
stretches back to the year 1855, and, though cobras have been killed in
and around my house, and in the plantations, I have not only never known
of a death from snake bi