respiration, for it is impossible to conceive that the process of breathing could be carried on while the mouth and throat were so completely stuffed and expanded by the body of the goat, and the lungs themselves (admitting the trachea to be ever so hard) compressed as they must have been by its passage downwards.
“The whole operation of completely gorging the goat occupied about two hours and twenty minutes: at the end of which time the tumefaction was confined to the middle part of the body, or stomach, the superior parts, which had been so much distended, having resumed their natural dimensions. He now coiled himself up again and lay quietly in his usual torpid state for about three weeks or a month, when his last meal appearing to be completely digested and dissolved, he was presented with another goat, which he killed and devoured with equal facility.”
In an interesting memoir published in the Zoological Journal, vol. ii., Mr. Broderip has given a very similar account of the seizure of a rabbit by one of the large Pythons kept in the Tower. Our limits will not permit us to do more than refer to it; but we will cite the remarks of this zoologist on a point in Mr. M'Leod’s account which seemed to him incorrect. “It is my opinion that the Boa [or Python] does respire ‘when his head and neck have no other appearance than that of a serpent’s skin stuffed almost to bursting;’ and I think that, upon a more close examination, the same phenomenon would have been observable in the Serpent shipped at Batavia. It is to be regretted that the dissection of the Serpent appears to have been confined to the
