Well, Tom, we could always add it to the list of literary puzzlers. My 
 two contributions would be the ending of Dorothy Johnson's "The Man Who 
 Shot Liberty Valance" and Chapter IV of "Tom Outland's Story" in 
 Cather's THE PROFESSOR'S HOUSE where the explorers of Mesa Verde find a 
 set of stone age medical tools including a catheter. A pun by Cather, 
 who had dreams as a youth of being a doctor? What did she think an 
 Anasazi healer would do with a catheter?

 Hey, perhaps the gopher snake told Abbey his Latin name and Abbey took 
 his word for it. (Now we can reference Jack Schaefer's CONVERSATIONS 
 WITH A POCKET GOPHER!

 Stay warm out there,
 James Work





 On Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:11:18 -0600, Tom Lynch <[log in to unmask]> 
 wrote:
> So I was teaching Ed Abbey's "Serpents of Paradise" and wanted to 
> post
> images of the various snakes mentioned in that essay on Blackboard 
> for
> my student's to see. I typed in a search for images of “Drymarchon
> corais couperi" which he gives as the scientific name for the bull
> snake or gopher snake he brings into his trailer (21). But the 
> results
> I got were for the eastern indigo snake, not the gopher snake at all.
> I can't believe I am the first reader to discover that Abbey got the
> scientific name of this snake wrong, but can't find any references to
> it. Has anybody else noticed this? Seems a pretty serious error to
> have gone uncorrected and unremarked upon all these years.
> -Tom
>
> --
>
> Tom Lynch
> Associate Professor
> Chair, Undergraduate Studies
> Department of English
> 202 Andrews Hall
>  P.O. Box 880333
> University of Nebraska, Lincoln
> Lincoln, NE  68588-0333 [1]
>
>  "Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance
> and conscientious stupidity."
> -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
>
> New Books:
>
> _The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, Place [2]_
>  _Artifacts & Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley [3]_
>
>  Homepage [4]
> Faculty Page [5]
>
>
> Links:
> ------
> [1] mailto:[log in to unmask]
> [2]
> http://www.ugapress.org/index.php/books/the_bioregional_imagination
> [3]
> 
> http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Artifacts-and-Illuminations,674965.aspx
> [4] http://english.unl.edu/tlynch2/
> [5] http://english.unl.edu/faculty/profs/tlynch.html