Persons who dislike snakes continually ask, ‘What is the use of them?’ That they are not without a use will, I hope, appear in the course of this work, were it necessary to preach that _all_ things have their use. But in one habit that offended Lord Bacon, viz. of ‘going on their belly,’ lies one of their greatest uses, because that, together with their internal conformation and external covering, enables them to penetrate where no larger carnivorous animal could venture, into dense and noisome morasses, bogs, jungles, swamps, amid the tangled vegetation of the tropics, where swarms of the lesser reptiles, on which so many of them feed, would otherwise outbalance the harmony of nature, die, and produce pestilences. Wondrously and exquisitely constructed for their habitat, they are able to exist where the higher animals could not; and while they help to clear those inaccessible places of the lesser vermin, they themselves supply food for a number of the smaller mammalia, which, with many carnivorous birds, devour vast numbers of young snakes. The hedgehog, weasel, ichneumon, rat, peccary, badger, hog, goat, and an immense number of birds keep snakes within due limits, while the latter perform their part among the grain-devouring and herbivorous lesser creatures. Thus beautifully is the balance of nature maintained. Dr. Kirtland, an eminent naturalist of Ohio, who lived at a time when that State was being very rapidly settled, namely, during the early and middle part of the present century, observed a great increase of certain snakes as game birds which fed on them decreased. The latter were, of course, in request for the market, and the snakes, the ‘black snake’ particularly, having fewer enemies to consume him, flourished accordingly. It would be worth while to ascertain whether the farmer in Ohio had reason to rejoice over this redundancy of rat and vermin consumers. At the present time, when so much of the land is under cultivation, snakes have decreased again through human agency. [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER III. _OPHIDIAN TASTE FOR BIRDS’ EGGS._ CAN we correctly say that snakes have a ‘taste’ for eggs? What flavour can there be in an egg-shell, and what pleasure or gratification can a snake derive from swallowing a hard, round, tasteless, apparently odourless, and inconvenient mass like a large egg?