The notion that snakes fascinate their prey, attracting it or reducing it to immobility by a mysterious power in their glittering eyes, is pure fable. Animals placed in a cage with a snake evince no particular fright, and fly away when pursued, if not actually turning round to defend themselves. It is even dangerous to offer a good-sized snake a wild rat for food, as all keepers of menageries know.
In cold and temperate climates snakes hibernate, lying more or less torpid in holes or hollow trees, sometimes assembled in numbers and coiled together in a mass. The first thing they do in awakening in the spring is to cast the outer coating of the epidermis, as described above (p. 20). Several exuviations take place during the period of activity, sometimes pretty regularly every month, sometimes at very irregular intervals. A few days previous to this operation the snake is languid and abstains from feeding; its skin is dull and the sight impaired by the opaque condition of the lid; a day or two before moulting, the outer stratum of the epidermis becomes again transparent and the eye clear, through this stratum becoming detached from the subjacent tissue, until it is pulled off in one piece, by the snake rubbing itself against stones or bushes. The first exuviation takes place very shortly after birth.
Snakes are long-lived, although the limit of duration of life is not known in any of them. They grow slowly, and do not appear ever to reach sexual maturity until the fourth year, when they continue increasing in size for a long period. A _Python reticulatus_ and an _Ancistrodon piscivorus_ are reported to have lived twenty-one years in captivity in Paris. The young of many snakes are very secretive, and are not often found in the open, those that are met with being as a rule either new-born or approaching sexual maturity.
Snakes are tenacious of life, and remarkable for the reflex movements which take place after they have been cut to pieces, the severed parts of the body and tail wriggling for a considerable time, and the head endeavouring to bite. Accounts of decapitated Rattlesnakes turning round and striking with their bloody stumps are probably not snake stories.
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