ttlesnake is irritated and
cannot be revenged, it bites itself, and dies in a few hours_:

"Wird dieses Thier zornig gemacht, und es kann sich nicht raechen, so
beiszt es sich selbst, und in wenig Stunden ist es todt."--P. 113.[6]

"I have seen some of our Canadians eat these rattlesnakes repeatedly.
The flesh is very white, and they assured me had a delicious taste.
Their manner of dressing them is very simple.... Great caution,
however, is required in killing a snake for eating; for if the first
blow fails, or only partially stuns him, _he instantly bites himself in
different parts of the body, which thereby become poisoned_, and would
prove fatal to any person who should partake of it."--Cox's _Adv. on
the Columbia River_: Lond. 1832, p. 74.

"Dr. Fordyce knew the black servant of an Indian merchant in America,
who was fond of soup made of rattlesnakes, in which he always boiled
the head along with the rest of the animal, without any regard to the
poisons."--Rees's _Cyclopaedia_.

"There is a religious sect in Africa, not far from Algiers, which eat
the most venomous serpents _alive_; and certainly, it is said, without
extracting their fangs. They declare they enjoy the privilege from
their founder. The creatures writhe and struggle between their teeth;
but possibly, if they do bite them, the bite is innocuous."

Mrs. Crowe, in the concluding chapter of her _Night-side of Nature_, gives
the testimony of an eye-witness to "the singular phenomenon to be observed
by placing a scorpion and a mouse together under a glass."

"It is known that _stags renew their age by eating serpents_; so the
phoenix is restored by the nest of spices she makes to burn in. The
pelican hath the same virtue, whose right foot, if it be put under hot
dung, after three months a pelican will be bred from it. Wherefore some
physicians, with some confections made of _a viper_ and hellebore, and
of some of the flesh of these creatures, _do promise to restore youth,
and sometimes they do it_."[7]

On reading any of our old herbalists, one would imagine that serpents (and
those of the worst kind) abounded in "Merrie Englande," and that they were
the greatest bane of our lives. It is {40} hard to stumble on a plant that
is not an antidote to the bite of serpents. Our old herbals were compiled,
however, almost entirely from the writings of the an