Several of the old authors quoted in the chapter on Rattlesnake History of the Seventeenth Century were quite aware of the action of the ‘Springing Teeth,’ ‘Master Teeth,’ or ‘Canine Teeth,’ as the fangs were variously called; and Lawson, 1707, describes ‘the Teeth which poison are two on each side of the Upper Jaws. These are bent like a Sickle, and hang loose as if by a Joint.’ Fontana’s observations were possibly of greater scientific importance, otherwise it is singular that his equally thoughtful predecessors, from whom he no doubt culled much important information, should have been overlooked. In these viperine fangs there is an analogy between the vipers and the lophius, a fish with moveable teeth; only in the fish, as Owen tells us, the action is not volitional,—the teeth bend back to admit food, and then by elastic muscles spring up again to retain it. The true nature of the reserve fangs was surmised by Mr. John Bartram, who in 1734 wrote from German Town, in the American colonies, to a F.R.S., ‘On a Cluster of Small Teeth at the Root of each Fang or Great Tooth.’[104] He had a rattlesnake, ‘now a Rarity near our Settlements,’ and dissected it, when he ‘found in the Head what has not been observed before by any that I can remember; _i.e._ a Cluster of Teeth on each side of the Upper Jaw at the Root of the Great Fangs through which the Poison is ejected. In the same Case that the two main Teeth were sheathed in, lay four others at the Root of each Tooth in a Cluster of the same Shape and Figure as the great ones, and I am apt to think for the same Use and Purposes, if by an Accident the main Teeth happen to be broken. May not these be placed to supply a Defect successively, for the Support of this Creature?’ Mr. Bartram was singularly correct in his diffidently-offered surmises; nor is it likely that in such a remote district as German Town then was, he had ready access to foreign publications, or would have claimed originality had he been cognisant of the work of M. Moyse Charas, _New Experiments upon Vipers_, translated from the original French in 1673. Charas, after describing the ‘_Great Teeth_,’ refers to the ‘smaller teeth’ (reserve fangs) ‘that are there in a Nursery, and are, if we may say so, in expectation to serve instead of the many Teeth, whether these come to fail of their force, or fall out of themselves.’ The author, to add weight to conclusions evidently originating from personal investigations, tells us that he had ‘taken Pains to grovel with a good deal of Patience in the Gums of innumerable Vipers.’ The Italian Redi, even prior to Charas, had also ‘grovelled’ in the gums of Vipers, and observed the canal or slit in the fang, ‘_si fendono per lo lungo dalla radice alla punta_,’ and that these canaliculated teeth in the moveable jaws (_ossi mobili_) were for the conveyance of the venom.[105]