Mr. George Catlin in his _Life among the Indians_ relates a circumstance of this kind which may well be introduced here, as illustrative of this amazing fact—a rattlesnake coiling and springing after it is decapitated. His party were going down a river, and had just landed to explore a little, when he saw a large Crotalus, and seizing his gun fired at its head. At the same moment it leaped and sprang towards him, apparently striking him on the breast, Mr. Catlin being on the point of leaping back into the boat. He thought he had fired and missed his aim, and was a dead man, nevertheless much wondering at having missed his mark. Meantime, an Indian, seeing a spot of blood on the front of Mr. Catlin’s linen smock, exclaimed, ‘You are bitten!’ and without ceremony the smock and flannel shirt were torn open, and a spot of blood on his breast was exposed to view. Promptly the blood was washed off, and the Indian on his knees had his mouth at the wound preparing to suck out the poison. Quickly looking up, however, he rose to his feet, and with a smile of exultation said, ‘There’s no harm! You’ll find the snake without its head.’ Stepping ashore again, and pushing aside the long grass, there, sure enough, was the headless rattlesnake, coiled up where it had fallen, and with its headless trunk erect, ready for another spring. Mr. Catlin had _not_ missed fire, but the creature so near the spring, was so ready at the instant with its aim made, that it leapt and struck Mr. Catlin probably on the very spot where it would have bitten him had the sportsman missed his mark. The bleeding trunk had printed its stroke with blood, driving the stain through the dress to the skin. ‘How curious it is,’ Mr. Catlin remarks at the conclusion of his narrative, ‘that if you cut off the head of a rattlesnake, its body will live for hours, and jump at you if you touch it with a stick, when if you break his spine near the tail, with even a feeble blow, it is dead in a minute. This we proved on several occasions.’ Mr. Catlin also helps to confirm what has been already stated in these pages, viz. the certainty of the mate being within hearing of the rattle, and responding when one of them sounds an alarm; also that ‘they can track each other and never lose company, though when met are not always seen together, so that if we kill one over-night and leave its dead body, the other will be found by its side in the morning.’ A near relative of the rattlesnake is the ‘copper-head,’ _Trigonocephalus contortrix_ of the United States, known also as the ‘Red adder,’ and the ‘Dumb rattlesnake.’ It is the _Boa contortrix_ of Linnæus, who, as we explained above, and also in chap. ii., divided the Ophidia into only three or four families, calling an immense number, both venomous and harmless, ‘boas.’