240 Professor Owen on Eocene Serpents 



spirits of the departed were ferried over from the land of the Franks 

 at njidnight." — Mac<xulay's History of England, vol. i., p. 5. 



The discovery of serpents of different genera and species, some, as 

 e.^.PaZerya;, terrestrial, and all manifesting the peculiar and character- 

 istic Vertebral organization of true Ophidian at a period incalculably 

 remote from that at which we have any evidence of the existence of 

 man, more forcibly recalls our early ideas of the nature and origin 

 of serpents derived from annotations to Scripture which represented 

 them as the progeny of a transmuted species, degraded from its 

 originally created form as the consequence and punishment of its in- 

 strumentality in the temptation of Eve. 



"The curse upon the serpent," say the learned Drs D'Oyly and 

 Mant, in the edition of the Bible printed under the direction of the 

 Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, ed. 1823, " con- 

 sisted, \st, in bringing down his stature, which was probably, in great 

 measure, erect before this time ; ' upon thy belly shalt thou go," or, 

 ' upon thy breast,' as some versions have it : 2<iZy, In the meanness 

 of his provision, ' and dust shalt thou eat,' insomuch as creeping 

 upon the ground, it cannot but lick up much dust together with its 

 food." 



The idea of the special degradation of the serpent to its actual 

 form, derived from interpreting the sentence upon it as a literal 

 statement of fact, has been so prevalent as to have affected some of 

 the zoological treatises of the last century. Thus, in the quaint and 

 learned " Natural History of Serpents," by Charles Owen, D.D., 

 4to, 1742, p. 12, the author, treating of the food of those reptiles, 

 writes, — " That dust was not the original food of the serpent seems 

 evident from the sentence passed upon the Paradisaick serpent, but 

 the necessary consequence of the change made in the manner of its 

 motion, i. e., the prone posture of its body, by which it is doomed to 

 live upon food intermixed with earth." 



Dr Adam Clark, commenting more recently upon the record in 

 its literal sense, seeks to elude the difficulties which thence arise, 

 by contending that the Hebrew *' Nachash," may be translated 

 " Ape,"" as well as " Serpent." But when we find him reduced to 

 the necessity of glossing the text by such expositions, as that to go 

 on the belly, means " on all-fours ;" and by affirming, of the arboreal 

 frugivorous four-handed monkeys, that " they are obliged to gather 

 their food from the ground," we have a lively instance of the straits 

 to which the commentator is reduced who attempts to penetrate 

 deeper than the Word warrants, into the nature of that mysterious 

 beginning of crime and punishment, by the dim light of an imperfect 

 and second-hand knowledge of the divine works. 



If, indeed, the laws of the science of Animated Nature formed 

 part of the preliminary studies of the theologist, the futility of such 

 attempts to expound the third chapter of Genesis, viewed as a simple 

 narration of facts, would be better appreciated by him ; and if he 



