SERPENT-CHARM. 607 



mischief of anti-natural dogmas could be estimated by their direct 

 effects the propagation of a greater or smaller number of preposter- 

 ous tenets ; the chief bane of their influence is indirect and subjective, 

 rather than objective. Not external facts only, but our own vision, 

 they have obscured ; the victims of supernaturalism have lost their 

 critical faculty as well as their critical conscience their standard of 

 probability itself has been falsified. Like an all-pervading mist, the 

 poison-vapor of mysticism has obscured the light of science, and 

 blinded the eye of common sense to innumerable fallacies and charla- 

 tanries. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus is the patron-saint of all quacks 

 of mesmerists, fasting girls, blue glass and patent-medicine peddlers 

 as well as of indulgence-brokers. Mere dogma- worship might imply 

 connivance, rather than blindness a sort of noli -me-tang 'ere awe more 

 than insensibility ; but also in scientific theorems where free inquiry is 

 not only permitted but specially invited, the most obvious and palpable 

 nonsense fails to be seen and felt. For people who have been fuddled 

 with mysticism lose their relish for simple truth ; the old credo quod 

 absurdum videtur (" since it appears preposterous, I believe it") seems 

 to be their motto. 



A very characteristic instance of this abject credulity is the ser- 

 pent-charm superstition. Millions of our countrymen still believe in 

 what they call snake-charming ; i. e., the ability of certain reptiles to 

 paralyze smaller animals by the magic power of their eyes, a belief 

 whose tenacity and extravagant absurdity nearly justify Pierre Gas- 

 sendi's complaint that in regard to all occult phenomena the most 

 supernatural theory is sure to become the popular one. Blacksnakes 

 overtake their prey by superior swiftness and strangle them by superior 

 strength ; but the fact that such sluggish creatures as the Indian cobra 

 and the American rattlesnake are able to capture birds and squirrels 

 seemed to demand an abnormal explanation, and the demand, as usual, 

 was equaled by the supply. Truth-loving and otherwise intelligent 

 persons listen gravely to stories about linnets who hopped from branch 

 to branch into the penetralia of a snake-infested bush, or swallows who 

 paused in their headlong flight, hovered with tremulous wings for a 

 minute or two, and then descended in a reluctant flutter toward a ditch 

 or hedge where the enemy lay concealed, a coiled snake with a pair of 

 twinkling optics that glittered like demons' eyes, while the doomed 

 bird came nearer and nearer, and finally saved the serpent the trouble 

 of swallowing it by hopping down its throat. The natives of our 

 Southern coast States ascribe the same faculty to lizards and toads ; 

 and the darkeys of the Georgia river plantations, if asked to account 

 for the frequent disappearance of sucking pigs, used to explain that 

 they had been charmed away by alligators, who, without leaving their 

 native element, were able to draw a pig clear across a ten-acre field by 

 cocking their eyes in a peculiar way ! But the arch-conjurer of our 

 continent is still the sneaking rattlesnake, whose power for mischief is 



