Audubon's judgment or memory might play him false, but his pencil, in such a matter, could be relied upon to tell the truth. It is therefore a pleasure to be able to confirm his accuracy in reference to the serpent's tooth, for the true representation of which he was roundly abused during his lifetime. The reader will perceive the point by examining the accompanying photograph, which represents the skull of a large diamond-backed specimen from Florida.[67] In the prairie rattlesnake, and probably in some others, the fangs are sickle-shaped, as Waterton maintained, but upwards of eleven species of rattlesnakes have been found on the continent of North America, and, true to Audubon's disputed drawing and account, in this Florida specimen the fangs are _slightly_, but _very distinctly, bent upwards at their tips_! Let nature writers, inclined to the easy path of analogy, remember the rattlesnake's fang, for it teaches a salutary lesson. [Illustration: VINDICATION OF AUDUBON'S REPRESENTATION OF THE FANGS OF THE SOUTHERN RATTLESNAKE: ABOVE, DETAIL OF THE "MOCKING BIRDS," PLATE XXI (UNCOLORED) OF "THE BIRDS OF AMERICA"; BELOW, THE SKULL OF A RECENT FLORIDA SPECIMEN, SHOWING THE SAME RECURVATURE OF FANG.] As I have not hesitated to speak of Audubon's real or supposed mistakes, I will give another and more striking instance of his tardy vindication. In his plate of the American Swan (No. ccccxi), which was published in 1838, there is represented a yellow water lily, under the name of _Nymphaea lutea_. Since this lily was then quite unknown to botanists, it was ignored and treated as a fable, or as an extravagant vagary of the naturalist's imagination, until the summer of 1876, when it was rediscovered in Florida by Mrs. Mary Treat. Audubon's long lost lily was then identified and acknowledged by Professor Asa Gray, the botanist, who, with poetic justice, proposed to rename it after the discredited enthusiast, in view of the fact that it had been originally discovered and faithfully depicted by him a generation before.