on the prairies, or of a cavy in the swamps of a Brazilian forest. With the constrictors, however, it is different. The smaller ones, indeed, seem to retain their full vigour, or, if not that, something very like it, for they are capable—as I have myself seen—of killing a rat almost instantaneously. It is different with the huge pythons, or anacondas, which lose their force, together with their appetite, in confinement, so that their languid and clumsy efforts—lasting for a long period—to take the life of their victims, may be compared to those of a drunken headsman with a blunt axe. Manifestly, therefore, to give them such a creature as a goat to mumble, and in such a sort of fern-case as they occupy, is a revolting thing; but I cannot see that a flagrant abuse like this condemns the principle. Were a combined rockery and shrubbery, as large as a good-sized garden, accorded the python, say, and were it in some hot country, the sun of which acted upon its system like Falstaff's "excellent sherris sack"—its own, for instance, at the Cape, or in Durban—then I should recognise no wrong done in introducing a goat or pig (preferably, however, a wild animal) into its sanctum. The conditions would, in that case, be the same, or closely similar, to those which govern under nature, nor can I see that it matters much, in ethics, whether a snake eats its dinner inside, or outside, a paling. If it is wrong to see it do so in the one case, it is wrong in the other, and the contention that it is wrong in either sanctions the principle of an officious interference in the ways of the animal
