and the Serpent of the Bible. 241 



should still be prompted to append his thoughts, as so many lamps 

 by the side of the second text, he would most probably restrict him- 

 self to the attempt to elucidate its symbolical signification. 



What zoology and anatomy have unfolded of the nature of serpents 

 in regard to their present condition, amounts to this: — that their 

 parts are as exquisitely adjusted to the form of their whole, and to 

 their habits and sphere of life, as is the organization of any animal 

 which, in the terms of absolute comparison, we call superior to them. 

 It is true, the serpent has no limbs, yet it can outclimb the monkey, 

 outswim the fish, outleap the jerboa, and, suddenly loosing the close 

 coils of its crouching spiral, it can spring into the air and seize the 

 bird up&n the wing ; thus all these creatures fall its prey. The 

 serpent has neither hands nor talons, yet it can outwrestle the athlete, 

 and crush the tiger in the embrace of its ponderous overlapping folds. 

 Far from licking up its food as it glides along, the serpent lifts up 

 its crushed prey, and presents it, grasped in the death-coil as in the 

 hajid, to the gaping slime-dropping mouth. 



(it is truly wonderful to see the work of hands, feet, fins, per- 

 formed by a simple modification of the vertebral column in a multi- 

 plication of its joints, with mobility of its ribs. But the vertebrae 

 are specially modified, as I have already described, to compensate, by 

 the strength of their individual articulations, for the weakness of their 

 manifold repetition and of the consequent elongation of the slender 

 column. 



As serpents move chiefly on the surface of the earth, their danger 

 is greatest from pressure and blows from above ; all the joints are 

 accordingly fashioned to resist yielding, and to sustain pressure 

 in a vertical direction ; there is no natural undulation of the body 

 upwards and downwards, it is permitted only from side to side. So 

 closely and compactly do the ten pairs of joints between each of the 

 two or three hundred vertebras fit together, that even in the relaxed 

 and dead state the body cannot be twisted, except in a series of side coils. 



Of this the reader may assure himself by a simple experiment on 

 a dead and supple snake. Let him lay it straight along a level 

 surface ; seize the end of the tail, and, by a movement of rotation 

 between the thumb and finger, endeavour to screw the snake into 

 spiral coils ; before he can produce a single turn, the whole of the 

 long and slender body will roll over as rigidly as if the attempt had 

 been made upon a straight stick. 



When we call to mind the anatomical structure of the skull, 

 the singular density and thickness of the bones of the cranium, 

 strike us as a special provision against fracture and injury 

 to the head. When we contemplate the still more remarkable man- 

 ner in which these bones are applied one over another, the super- 

 occipital, overlapping the exoccipital, and the parietal overlapping 

 the superoccipital, the natural segments being sheathed one within 

 the other, the occipital segment within the parietal one, we 



VOL. XLIX. NO. XCVIII. — OCTOBER 1850. Q 



