Johan Abraham Lidenius has arrived in Philadelphia on July 21 after more than seven weeks of travel from city to city. At last, he has found an opportunity to send letters and dissertations to New York with a reliable messenger, who promised to forward them to their addressee.
Lidenius has used most of his time on visiting the congregations one after the other, on seeing his relatives and on learning about the people of the country. When he visited an uncle, he saw a horn-snake returning to its lair and there devouring the newly hatched young, which was believed to make them more poisonous. The snake, almost six feet long, was killed, and inside, we found a lot of young, but without life. It had teeth in both its jaws and a long tongue, cleft in the end, and under it a pharynx full of a dark yellow material, similar to blood. Its tail, which it always wags when it has bitten something, ends in a four inches long part that is hard as horn. This animal is the first item in Lidenius’s collections.
Lidenius has also killed a rattle-snake, eight years old but still rather big. And he had just escaped being bitten by a viper when dismounting. The snake was so inflated that it looked like a piece of wood.
When Lidenius goes to the coast later on and then farther up into the country, he hopes to get something worth sending to Linnaeus and to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademien]. However, Lidenius does not think he will find anything new, since Pehr Kalm has made such careful investigations.
Lidenius sends Linnaeus his greetings.