Word: snakes
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...snake venom is highly virulent;* Hindus have discovered, however, that if it is highly diluted and given as homeopathic doses, it is very stimulating to animals. Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, Indian plant biologist, in his books (Longmans, Green, U. S. publishers) declares the diluted venom stimulating to plants also...
Anon a cobra, no pretty worm of Nilus,* creeps out of nowhere at the feet of that most famed snake charmer of Egypt. It raises its head and a length of body clear of the ground, quite resembling a rat terrier expectantly sitting up for a titbit. As the fakir puffs his cheeks in hissing whistle, the cobra puffs its hood and lazily sways to the sibilancies...
...India snake charmers are an impoverished, filthy, untouchable lot of Jogis. With woven baskets containing their trained pythons or cobras they traipse about villages and towns. For an anna or two the charmer sets his serpent on the ground and blows through his pungi. The pungi is a bottle-shaped gourd with two reeds or bamboos inserted. One tube has finger stop-holes and emits a shrill penetrating whine. The other has no holes and gives out a drone. Snakes have no ears. But under their skin they have two primitive ear drums and through those the Indian snake feels...
Fakirs who dally with venomous snakes take good care to defang them. The fangs are long, hollow teeth connecting with venom sacs in the snake's upper jaw. When the fangs puncture animal, fish or reptile the venom (in most snakes a yellowish fluid) is squeezed, like a hypodermic injection, into the victim's flesh. Hindus defang their serpents by searing the jaws with hot irons. Others rip the fangs out with pincers or flick a cloth at the snake's head until the fangs are caught in the cloth and yanked out. Defanged snakes quickly grow...
Last week the man at present most active in the world for snake poison research debarked at Manhattan. He was Dr. Afranio do Amaral, the soft-voiced suave herpetologist. He came from Brazil† where he is director of the Institute Sorotherapico at Butantan, State of Sao Paulo. His mission was to give a talk or two at Harvard's School of Public Health, where he is formally a lecturer, and to confer with Mulford's President Milton Campbell, his good friend and supporter. Dr. do Amaral is consulting director of Mulford's Antivenin Institute of America...