Fables and Prejudices regarding Serpents. 67 



they vaunt the efficacy. On consulting the passages of Pliny* 

 to which we refer, it will be seen that the ancients recommend 

 indiscriminately, for this purpose, the most heterogeneous 

 substances ; but that the attempts which they made were the 

 result of the grossest empiricism. Deceptions of this nature 

 are practised in India and Ceylon, where they sell pastilles and 

 pills of different kinds, arbitrarily composed of substances froui 

 the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, and which 

 merely act on the imagination of the sufferer.t 



We have stated above, that the practice of extracting 

 from serpents the remedies against their bite, dates from re- 

 mote antiquity : Antonius, physician to Augustus, employed 

 vipers in several diseases ; J but it was not until the time of 

 Nero, when the physician Andromachus of Crete, § invented 

 the ther'iaca^ that the practice became general. The theriac 

 was an arbitrary compound of heterogeneous medicaments, 

 and was afterwards employed in maladies of the most opposite 

 nature : it was compounded in the middle ages in almost all 

 the cities of Europe, particularly in its southern parts : at this 

 day, the practice of including the snake in the composition 

 of this medicament is only retained in Italy, where the theriac 

 is still made in various places. In Sicily it is prepared at 

 Palermo. That of Venice is very celebrated : there they use 

 millions of the Vipera aspis, which is common in the vicinity 

 of that city. II The great manufacture of theriac which exists 

 at Naples, under the protection of the government, is a pri- 

 vate speculation, at the head of which stands the learned Pro- 

 fessor Delle Chiaje ; there they use indiscriminately every 

 species of serpent, although they prefer the vipers named 

 viperiere by the peasants, who bring them alive in baskets. 

 M. Siebold assures me that they frequently employ a species 

 of theriac in China and Japan ; the inhabitants of the Lioukiou 

 Isles extract medicaments from the Hydrophis colubrina ; and 



* Hist. Natur., 28, 42, 29, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 32, 17, 19, &c. 



t Russell, i. p. 74 ; Davy, Ceylon, p. 100. 



X Plin. 30, 39. 



§ Galen, de Antidotis, lib. i. cap. 6. 



II MS. note communicated by the late Dr Michahelles. 



