The idea of a snake being sufficiently intelligent, reasoning, and reflective to deliberately ‘run its tongue out at you,’ as if conscious of its own moral power and your moral weakness, is too ludicrous. If the snake could truly inflict injury with those soft, flexible, delicate filaments,—if it could, with one rapid touch, insert poison, as the tall talker at the Zoological Gardens affirmed, the threatening quiver could only be in friendly warning. Let the poor reptile at least be thanked for that. Our lamented friend, Frank Buckland, fell into the same error (or inadvertency, since he quite understood that the tongue could do no harm) when he wrote thus of the tongue in his _Curiosities of Natural History_:—‘The tongue is generally protruded in order to intimidate the bystanders;’ and, ‘The tongue acts as a sort of intimidation to its aggressors;’ thus giving the snake the credit of a waggish sort of intelligence, far more complimentary to the reptile than to the bystander. In imagination we behold a solemn Convention of snakes, held in ages long ago, and a resolution to this effect passed unanimously:—‘Now these poor ignorant mortals think we can kill them with our soft and tender tongues. Though so tall, and powerful, and terrible to us, they look dreadfully frightened whenever we use our tongues in our own service. Therefore, whenever any of these two-legged creatures come near us, we will put out our tongues at them, and frighten them off,’—a resolution which has answered admirably well down to the present time. ‘Down to the present time’ is written and repeated in all seriousness. Let me be pardoned for introducing a little more gossip here, as it is the fashion to relate what is seen and heard at the Zoological Gardens. And so much is related, and has been related, and even printed, to mislead the public, that, in the earnest hope and aspiration of assisting in correcting false impressions, I claim to repeat what was heard as well as the rest. Besides, when persons talk as loudly as if they were delivering a lecture, and apparently with the benevolent intention of instructing the public generally, one feels justified in quoting them. Eight years ago, when first contemplating this work, and anxiously seeking to ascertain precisely what could be learned, and what was already understood about snakes, so far as the reptile house at the Zoological Gardens was a means of instruction, I made very careful notes of what I saw there, and occasionally of what I _heard_ there. In the summer of 1874 some well-dressed children, accompanied by their parents, were watching the pythons in the largest cage, when one of the little ones asked, ‘Papa, what is that thing that the snake keeps putting out of its mouth?’ ‘Oh, that is its poisonous sting,’ replied the father. The eldest girl (in her teens), with an affected shudder, cried ‘Ugh!’ and a boy exclaimed, ‘I am glad it can’t put it through the glass at _us_!’