Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts Part 50

Coral Snake Copperhead Moccasin Pigmy Rattler Timber Rattler Diamond-back Rattler]

Here are distinguis.h.i.+ng marks: The Moccasins, as well as the Rattlers, have on each side of the head, between the eye and nostril, a deep pit.

The pupil of the eye is an upright line, as in a cat; the harmless snakes have a round pupil.

The Moccasins have a single row of plates under the tail, while the harmless snakes have a double row.

The Water Moccasin is dull olive with wide black transverse bands.

The Copperhead is dull hazel brown, marked across the back with dumb-bells of reddish brown; the top of the head more or less coppery.

Both Moccasins and Rattlers have a flat triangular head, which is much wider than the thin neck; while most harmless snakes have a narrow head that shades off into the neck.

Rattlesnakes are found generally distributed over the United States, southern Ontario, southern Alberta, and Saskatchewan.

How Does a Snake Bite

Remember, the tongue is a feeler, not a sting. The "stinging" is done by two long hollow teeth, or fangs, through which the poison is squirted into the wound.

The striking distance of a snake is about one-third the creature's length, and the stroke is so swift that no creature can dodge it.

The snake can strike farthest and surest when it is ready coiled, but can strike a little way when traveling.

You cannot disarm a poisonous snake without killing it. If the fangs are removed others come quickly to take their place. In fact, a number of small, half-grown fangs are always waiting ready to be developed.

In Case of Snake Bite

First, keep cool, and remember that the bite of American snakes is seldom fatal if the proper measures are followed.

You must act at once. Try to keep the poison from getting into the system by a tight bandage on the arm or leg (it is sure to be one or the other) just above the wound. Next, get it out of the wound by slas.h.i.+ng the wound two or more ways with a sharp knife or razor at least as deep as the puncture. Squeeze it--wash it out with permanganate of potash dissolved in water to the color of wine. Suck it out with the lips (if you have no wounds in the mouth it will do you no harm there). Work, ma.s.sage, suck, and wash to get all the poison out. After thorough treatment to remove the venom the ligature may be removed.

"Pack small bits of gauze into the wounds to keep them open and draining, then dress over them with gauze saturated with any good antiseptic solution. Keep the dressing saturated and the wounds open for at least a week, no matter how favorable may be the symptoms."

Some people consider whiskey or brandy a cure for snake bite. There is plenty of evidence that many have been killed by such remedies, and little that they have ever saved any one, except perhaps when the victim was losing courage or becoming sleepy.

In any case, send as fast as you can for a doctor. He should come equipped with hypodermic syringe, tubes of anti-venomous serum and strychnine tablets.

Harmless Snakes

Far the greatest number of our snakes are harmless, beautiful, and beneficient. They are friendly to the farmer, because, although some destroy a few birds, chickens, ducklings, and game, the largest part of their food is mice and insects. The Blacksnake, the Milk Snake, and one or two others, will bite in self-defence, but they have no poison fangs, and the bite is much like the p.r.i.c.k of a bramble.

THE STARS AS THE CAMPER SEES THEM

(See Plate of Stars and Princ.i.p.al Constellations)

So far as there is a central point in our heavens, that point is the pole-star, Polaris. Around this star all the stars in the sky seem to turn once in twenty-four hours.

It is easily discovered by the help of the Big Dipper, _a part of the_ Great Bear, known to every country boy and girl in the northern half of the world. This is, perhaps, the most important star group in our sky, because of its size, peculiar form, the fact that it never sets in our lat.i.tude, and that of its stars, two, sometimes called the Pointers always point out the Pole Star. It is called the Dipper because it is shaped like a dipper with a long, bent handle.

Why (_the whole group_) is called the Great Bear is not so easy to explain. The cla.s.sical legend has it that the nymph, Calisto, having violated her vow, was changed by Diana into a bear, which, after death, was immortalized in the sky by Zeus. Another suggestion is that the earliest astronomers, the Chaldeans, called these stars "the s.h.i.+ning ones," and their word happened to be very like the Greek _arktos_ (a bear). Another explanation is that vessels in olden days were named for animals, etc. They bore at the prow the carved effigy of the namesake, and if the Great Bear, for example, made several very happy voyages by setting out when a certain constellation was in the ascendant, that constellation might become known as the Great Bear's constellation.

Certainly, there is nothing in its shape to justify the name. Very few of the constellations indeed are like the thing they are called after.

Their names were usually given for some fanciful a.s.sociation with the namesake, rather than for resemblance to it.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

The pole-star is really the most important of the stars in our sky; it marks the north at all times; all the other stars seem to swing around it once in twenty-four hours. It is the end of the Little Bear's tail; this constellation is sometimes called the Little Dipper. But the Pole-star or Polaris, is not a very bright one, and it would be hard to identify but for the help of the Pointers of the Big Dipper.

The outside stars (Alpha and Beta) of the Dipper point nearly to Polaris, at a distance equal to five times the s.p.a.ce that separates these two stars of the Dipper's outer side.

Indian names for the Pole-star are the "Home Star," and "The Star That Never Moves," and the Big Dipper they call the "Broken Back."

The great Bear is also to be remembered as the hour-hand of the woodman's clock. It goes once around the North Star in about twenty-four hours, the same way as the sun, and for the same reason--that it is the earth that is going and leaving them behind.

The time in going around is not exactly twenty-four hours, so that the position of the Pointers varies with the seasons, but, as a rule, this for woodcraft purposes is near enough. The bowl of the Dipper swings four-fifths of the width of its own opening in one hour. If it went a quarter of the circle, that would mean you had slept a quarter of a day, or six hours.

Every fifteen days the stars seem to be an hour earlier: in three months they gain one-fourth of the circle, and in a year gain the whole circle.

According to Flammarion, there are about seven thousand stars visible to the naked eye, and of these twenty are stars of the first magnitude.

Fourteen of them are visible in the lat.i.tude of New York, the others (those starred) belong to the South Polar region of the sky. The following table of the brightest stars is taken from the Revised Harvard Photometry of 1908, the best authority on the subject.

THE FIRST TWENTY STARS IN ORDER OF BRIGHTNESS

1. Sirius, the Dog Star.

2. *Canopus, of the s.h.i.+p.

3. *Alpha, of the Centaur.

4. Vega, of the Lyre.

5. Capella, of the Charioteer.

6. Arcturus, of the Herdsman.

7. Rigel, of Orion.

8. Procyon, the Little Dog-Star.

9. *Achernar, of Erida.n.u.s.

10. *Beta, of the Centaur.

11. Altair, of the Eagle.

12. Betelgeuze, of Orion's right shoulder.

13. *Alpha of the Southern Cross.

14. Aldebaran, of the Bull's right eye.

15. Pollux, of the Twins.

16. Spica, of the Virgin.

17. Antares, of the Scorpion.

18. Fomalhaut, of the Southern Fish.

19. Deneb, of the Swan.

20. Regulus, of the Lion.