The Adventure of the Speckled Band the snake wrong, a theory that the swamp adder was an artificial hybrid between the Mexican Gila monster ("Heloderma suspectum") and "Naja naja". His speculation suggests that Doyle might have hidden a double-meaning in Holmes' words. What Holmes said, reported by Watson, was "It is a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in India"; but Klauber suggested what Holmes really said was "It is a "samp-aderm", the deadliest skink in India." "Samp-aderm" can be translated "snake-Gila-monster": "Samp" is Hindi for snake, and the suffix "aderm" is derived from "heloderm", the common or vernacular name of the Gila monster generally used by
The problem of the speckled hen Ayers' words, speckles are enumerable only if in fact they have been enumerated. A number of philosophers analyzed the merits of this proposition. Chisholm concludes that the problem of the speckled hen emphacises the fact that there are basic propositions (synthetic propositions which do not refer beyond the content of the immediate experience) that are necessarily imprecise. The problem of the speckled hen In the theory of empirical knowledge, the problem of the speckled hen is whether a single immediate observation of a speckled hen provides a certain knowledge of the number of speckles observed. Clearly, this is not an