pup, I neither could then, nor can now, undertake to say whether the pup was a wild one or not, though it seemed to me that it might have been a kind of mongrel animal with a good deal of the pariah dog in it.  The natives then requested the cook to take the pup and pay them five rupees for their trouble.  This he declined to do, and they then said they would take it back to the carcase of the tiger and let it go.  This they did, and the pup was never heard of again, and I assume that it must have rejoined the wild dogs.  As my cook had no conceivable motive for falsely asserting that the dog was his, I can only assume that the animal had strayed away and joined the pack of wild dogs.

There is no reward for killing wild dogs in Mysore, as is the case in the Madras Presidency, and I should strongly advise that one should be given, as from the great destruction of the game, on which they at present live, these animals will soon become very destructive to cattle, and possibly, or even probably, dangerous to man.  And it is the more important to attend to this matter at once, because I find, from Jerdon’s “Mammals of India,” that the bitch has at least six whelps at a birth, and he mentions that Mr. Elliot (the late Sir Walter) remarks that the wild dog was not known in the Southern Maharatta country until of late years, but that it was now very common; and he adds that he once captured a bitch and seven cubs, and had them alive for some time.  No one has any interest in killing these jungle dogs, and until a reward is offered for their destruction, they will go on increasing at an alarming rate.

I now pass on to offer some remarks on snakes, and especially on the great number of deaths said to be caused by them, and I say said to be caused by them, because I have good reason to suppose that the immense number of deaths (sometimes returned at 17,000 or 18,000 for all India) reported as being caused by them, are really poisoning cases which are falsely returned as being due to snake bite.  When mentioning this surmise on board of a P. and O. ship to two civilians, they demurred to the idea, and I then asked them if they had ever known within their own cognizance of a man being killed by a snake—­i.e., either seen a man fatally bitten, or who had been fatally bitten.  They never had, and that too during a service of about twenty-four years.  I then, out of curiosity, made inquiries through all the first-class passengers, and at last met with one lady who had a gardener who had been killed by a snake.  I also got my English servant to make a similar inquiry in the second-class, and no passenger there had known of a case, though one of them had been engaged in surveying operations for ten years.  My attention has been particularly called to this subject in consequence of my own long experience, which stretches back to the year 1855, and, though cobras have been killed in and around my house, and in the plantations, I have not only never known of a death from snake bite