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.
61/246 page 35
![interval between each cast. At the approach of the casting, the colours of the snake become somewhat dull, and a white film is seen over the surface of the e}7e. When the skin, or rather the epidermis (for it is the colourless scarf skin which separates, like in human beings after an attack of scarlet fever) is ready to be cast, the snake rubs the skin back from his nose and chin, and seeks some projecting point such as would be afforded by a split bamboo, some stiff thatch, or a heap of stones, on which to catch the loose skin; perhaps adhesion is aided by the application of glutinous saliva; anyhow the snake manages to stick the loose skin of the nose and chin to some convenient object, and then proceeds to peel himself out of his epidermis which of course remains inside out like an eel’s skin after the involuntary exit of its tenant—with this difference, that the snake has had numerous opportunities, denied to the eel, of becoming used to the process. The cast skins are beautiful objects, there is often not a break in them from nose to tip. The epidermal covering of the eye comes off along with the rest of the skin, and eveiy scale, every keel is distinctly marked ; colour alone is absent,* but even without it the kind of snake to whom the skin belonged can often be identified.-]- They are very delicate and fragile, and are liable to destruction by mites unless kept shut up along with camphor. The cast skin of a Ptyas mucosus, 9 feet long, weighs 130 grains or a little over a quarter of an ounce. * The pattern of the Python and of some Dipsadidce is visible in their cast skins. t When I was stationed at Kamptee in 1868, the house I occupied, jointly with a brother-officer, also gave shelter to a cobra and a pair of Bungarus arcuatus. I never saw them, but easily identified them by the skins they periodically cast. The cobra lived on my friend’s side of the house, the other snakes lived in a hole in the wall under my dressing table.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b28051609_0061.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
