Indian snakes : an elementary treatise on ophiology with a descriptive catalogue of the snakes found in India and the adjoining countries / by Edward Nicholson.
- Nicholson, Edward
- Date:
- 1893
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Indian snakes : an elementary treatise on ophiology with a descriptive catalogue of the snakes found in India and the adjoining countries / by Edward Nicholson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![centre of a great part of the tooth, is really on the outside of the tooth, the canal in which it is lodged and protected being formed by a longitudinal inflection of the dentinal parietes of the pulp-cavity. This inflection commences a little beyond the base of the tooth, where its nature is readily appreciated, as the poison duct there rests in a slight groove or longitudinal indentation on the convex side of the fang; as it proceeds it sinks deeper into the substance of the tooth, and the sides of the groove meet and seem to coalesce so that the trace of the inflected fold ceases, in some species, to be perceptible to the naked eye; and the fang appears, as it is commonly described, to be perforated by the duct of the poison-gland. In the Hydrophis the groove remains permanently open. From the position of the poison-canal it follows that the transverse section of the tooth varies in form at different parts of the tooth : at the base it is oblong, with a large pulp-cavity of a correspond- ing form, with an entering notch at the anterior surface; further on, the transverse section presents the form of a horse-shoe, and the pulp-cavity that of a crescent, the horns of which extend into the sides of the deep cavity of the poison-fang: a little beyond this part the section of the tooth itself is crescentic, with the horns obtuse and in con- tact, so as to circumscribe the poison-canal; and along the whole of the middle four-sixths of the tooth the sec- tion * * * shows the dentine of the fang inclosing the poison-canal, and having its own centre or pulp-canal in the form of a crescentic fissure situated close to the concave border of the inflected surface of the tooth. The pulp- cavity disappears, and the poison-canal again resumes the form of a groove near the apex of the fang and terminates on the anterior surface in an elongated fissure.” On one point this description is somewhat imperfect and, I may venture to say, unsatisfactory ; it speaks of “ a canal in which it [the poison duct] is lodged and protected” and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28051609_0039.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
