Snakes

At Luxor, Egypt, all travelers who pay may hear a fat & sleek native gentleman mumble and whistle and beat a tambour.

Anon a cobra, no pretty worm of Nilus,* creeps out of nowhere at the feet of that most famed snake charmer of Egypt. It raises its head and a length of body clear of the ground, quite resembling a rat terrier expectantly sitting up for a titbit. As the fakir puffs his cheeks in hissing whistle, the cobra puffs its hood and lazily sways to the sibilancies.

In India snake charmers are an impoverished, filthy, untouchable lot of Jogis. With woven baskets containing their trained pythons or cobras they traipse about villages and towns. For an anna or two the charmer sets his serpent on the ground and blows through his pungi. The pungi is a bottle-shaped gourd with two reeds or bamboos inserted. One tube has finger stop-holes and emits a shrill penetrating whine. The other has no holes and gives out a drone. Snakes have no ears. But under their skin they have two primitive ear drums and through those the Indian snake feels the pungi's vibrations. And to them it wags its head like a tremulous dotard, puffing and belching the while.

Whether snakes respond instinctively to the charmer's whines and whistles is still an unsettled problem in animal psychology. Snakes have little brain and much spine. They are quick to respond to stimuli, and perhaps react directly to seductive vibrations. More probably their swaying--it is no dance--is a conditioned reflex. Charmers feed their snakes well, in India with milk, flour balls and meat (frogs). And it is doubtless with mounting hope of meals that snakes raise themselves to the fakir's minor music. Charmers who have tried their art in U. S. zoos and serpentaria have always failed, despite all their wheezing and whining.

Fakirs who dally with venomous snakes take good care to defang them. The fangs are long, hollow teeth connecting with venom sacs in the snake's upper jaw. When the fangs puncture animal, fish or reptile the venom (in most snakes a yellowish fluid) is squeezed, like a hypodermic injection, into the victim's flesh. Hindus defang their serpents by searing the jaws with hot irons. Others rip the fangs out with pincers or flick a cloth at the snake's head until the fangs are caught in the cloth and yanked out. Defanged snakes quickly grow new fangs.

All snake venom is highly virulent;* Hindus have discovered, however, that if it is highly diluted and given as homeopathic doses, it is very stimulating to animals. Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, Indian plant biologist, in his books (Longmans, Green, U. S. publishers) declares the diluted venom stimulating to plants also.

But normal venom kills with more or less speed. Cleopatra and Charmian dying within a few moments of their asp bites was no Shakespearean fairytale. The quietness of their death, however, was. Venom attacks the nerves as well as muscles. It causes profuse bleeding.

Where the fangs enter, a sharp burning pain is immediately felt. It gets worse. The wounds bleed; the parts get blue and swell. Numbness sets in and spreads; vomiting begins; breathing becomes difficult; paralysis starts. The victim suffocates, dies. Each year some 5,000 such tortured deaths occur in India. In the U. S. last year there were 27 reported. There might have been more, for at least 507 persons here were bitten by rattlers, moccasins, copperheads, massasaugas and corals. They are the only poisonous snakes in Canada and the U. S. More of the bitten might have died, had it not been for the antivenin developed by the Antivenin Institute of America and sold by H. K. Mulford Co., both of Philadelphia.

Last week the man at present most active in the world for snake poison research debarked at Manhattan. He was Dr. Afranio do Amaral, the soft-voiced suave herpetologist. He came from Brazil/- where he is director of the Institute Sorotherapico at Butantan, State of Sao Paulo. His mission was to give a talk or two at Harvard's School of Public Health, where he is formally a lecturer, and to confer with Mulford's President Milton Campbell, his good friend and supporter. Dr. do Amaral is consulting director of Mulford's Antivenin Institute of America.

That snake bite poisoning can be counteracted by a horse serum was discovered 25 years ago by Dr. Albert Calmette of the Paris Pasteur Institute. He injected first small doses of cobra venom, then increasingly larger doses into a horse, progressively the horse's blood developed proper antibodies. That horse's serum cured cobra bites--if used promptly, for cobra venom kills very quickly.

Brazil, infested with snakes, followed up his work. Its Institute of Serum Therapy soon became the world's foremost. Mulford's Antivenin Institute now ranks well with it.

Dr. do Amaral's work developing serums against U. S. snake bites was relatively easy. He had the technique of production. There remained to make a survey of noxious U. S. reptiles. He found only 19 kinds of them. Thirteen belonged to the rattler (Crotalus) family. Others were massasauga and pigmy rattler (Sistrurus family), copperhead and cottonmouth moccasin (Agkistrodon family), coral and harlequin (Micrurus family). Harlequins and corals are rare, appearing only in the south. Moccasins and copperheads frequent the southeastern and eastern states.

Identifying poisonous snakes is easy. Most of them belong to the pit-viper family. They have a deep depression between eye and nostril. Heads are flat and triangular, necks thin, bodies stout, tails short, eyes with elliptical pupils like a cat's. Fangs fold back against the roof of the mouth. A single row of scales runs along the belly. The biggest U. S. snake is the eastern diamond-back rattler, which grows to nine feet.

Contrary to lore snakes do not attack humans wantonly. They are lazy and timid and do not strike unless hurt or threatened with hurt. Exceptions are the African mamba, the Malayan King, the bushmaster of the tropics, and cascavel (a rattler) of Central America. A coach whip will sometimes follow a man. But it is only curious, and will speed away if threatened.

Dr. do Amaral, first at Manhattan and then at Mulford's in Philadelphia, last week repeated his standardized method of dealing with snake bites:

1) Catch the snake that did the biting. To identify it is to know what serum to use. Polyvalent serums are made, good against rattler, moccasin or copperhead bites. For other snakes specific anti-venoms must be used.

2) Apply a tourniquet above the knee or elbow whenever the bite is located below those levels. Release it every ten minutes to prevent gangrene.

3) Get the proper serum injected within 24 hours, the sooner the better.

4) Drink no alcohol at all. Use strychnine or coffee for stimulants. Cutting the wound and trying to suck out the venom is, he believes, useless.

Venom v. Epilepsy. When Dr. do Amaral reached Manhattan last week he had with him 40 South American snakes, present for Raymond Lee Ditmarks, curator of reptiles at the New York Zoological Park. Dr. Ditmarks fondly sorted the snakes. As he was doing so, Dr. Adolph Monaelesser, retired Manhattan physician, visited him. Dr. Monaelesser was President McKinley's surgeon of the Red Cross during the Spanish-American War. Lately he has been doing private research on epilepsy. His visit to the zoo was for some venom of the black African cobra. Dr. Ditmarks has the only one in the U. S. It is a peculiar snake, for it squirts its venom at its prey's (or enemy's) face. A drop of its venom blinds the eyes. Dr. Monaelesser hoped that a drop properly treated might be beneficial in epilepsy, nervous disease of obscure causes. So the two learned men tried to make the poor venomous fool angry and despatch his poison at a piece of glass. Perhaps wiser than most snakes, perhaps as lazy as most, the cobra spewed forth only a thin and useless spray. The two wise men felt foolish.

*Cleopatra's asp was probably a horned viper (Cerastes cornutus).

*All snakes are not venomous, nor killers. Of nonpoisonous ones, the constrictors kill prey by coiling around it and squeezing it to death.

/- But is no relative of His Excellency S. Gurgel do Amaral, Brazil's ambassador to the U.S.