st a
native follower by snake-bite. The man was bitten while out alone in
the forest, and, although he reached camp, the poison was already
working in him, so that he could give no intelligible account of what
had occurred, and he died in a short time.

Poisonous snakes are of several different families, but the most
poisonous ones, those which are dangerous to man, belong to the two
great families of the colubrine snakes and the vipers. Most of the
colubrine snakes are entirely harmless, and are the common snakes that
we meet everywhere. 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. These
coral-snakes are not vicious and have small teeth which cannot
penetrate even ordinary clothing. They are only dangerous if actually
trodden on by some one with bare feet or if seized in the hand. There
are harmless snakes very like them in color which are sometimes kept
as pets; but it behooves every man who keeps such a pet or who handles
such a snake to be very sure as to the genus to which it belongs.

The great bulk of the poisonous snakes of America, including all the
really dangerous ones, belong to a division of the widely spread
family of vipers which is known as the pit-vipers. In South America
these include two distinct subfamilies or genera--whether they are
called families, subfamilies, or genera would depend, I suppose,
largely upon the varying personal views of the individual describer on
the subject of herpetological nomenclature. One genus includes the
rattlesnakes, of which the big Brazilian species is as dangerous as
those of the southern United States. But the large majority of the
species and individuals of dangerous snakes in tropical America are
included in the genus lachecis. These are active, vicious, aggressive
snakes without rattles. They are exceedingly poisonous. Some of them
grow to a very large size, being indeed among the largest poisonous
snakes in the world--their only rivals in this respect being the
diamond rattlesnake of Florida, one of the African mambas, and the
Indian hamadryad, or snake-eating cobra. The fer-de-lance, so dreaded
in Martinique, and the equally dangerous bushmaster of Guiana are
included in this genus. A dozen s