ZOOLOGICAL SUPERSTITIONS. 165 



to enjoy the fruits of her victory. The next time she will commence 

 hostilities with a promptness evincing her wrath at the failure of her 

 former attempts. Some five or six successive encounters (though each 

 following discharge of poison may in some degree weaken the effect 

 of the next bite) will thus prove that the supposed magic influence of 

 the serpent's eye is nothing but the after-effect of a not strictly in- 

 stantaneous poison. The flexible poison-fangs of the serpent do not 

 enable her to hold her prey at the first snap, but she can afford to bide 

 her time, well knowing that the beginning of the end is only a ques- 

 tion of a few minutes. During the last of those minutes the victims 

 may behave in a most singular, though under the circumstances no- 

 ways abnormal, manner ; and I will agree to sign Jean Bodin's dis- 

 sertation on the disadvantages of natural explanations, if any thau- 

 maturgist, with a lingering vestige of common sense, should fail to 

 admit the conclusiveness of the experiment. 



The serpent-charm delusion is probably nothing but an outcome of 

 the evil-eye superstition, which in mediaeval Italy ranked almost as 

 an article of faith. In the same country poison-mongery had then 

 attained the perfection of an exact science. In Naples there were 

 experts who could specify the day when a tincture of Aqua to/ana, 

 repeated in a certain number of doses, would overcome the vitality 

 of the toughest constitution. Caesar Borgia could fetch his man by a 

 mere scratch of a finger-ring. Many of those artists may have studied 

 the subsequent appearance of their victims with a searching look, more 

 apt to attract attention than the furtive administration of the deadly 

 drug. If the victim died, his fate was ascribed to the influence of the 

 mal occhio, a mystic gift which made its possessor an object of dread 

 and envy, but of which the law could not properly take cognizance. 

 The snap-bite, administered perhaps in the tangle of a bramble-bush, 

 has escaped attention ; the temporary escape of the victim obliges the 

 serpent to sally from its hiding-place and watch the effect of the dose. 

 At that stage of proceedings the conduct, both of the bird and the 

 snake, is apt to attract the notice of a passer-by, who associates the 

 then visible phenomena — the fixed gaze of the serpent, and the ab- 

 normal motions of the bird — thus mistaking a coincident circumstance 

 for the cause of an effect. 



Exactly the same mistake has cost the lives of thousands of harm- 

 less birds of the family jPicidce. Woodpeckers live upon the larvje of 

 various species of noxious insects, and haunt dead trees where such 

 insects most abound : hence the extremely prevalent delusion con- 

 necting the activity of woodpeckers with the decay of trees. In the 

 language of the backwoodsmen the tree-cleaner has become a tree- 

 destroyer, a " sap-sucker," a name actually applied to the Picns pubes- 

 cens, or speckled woodpecker, of the North American forests. 



In a similar way the beneficent functions of the bat are still repaid 

 with the ingratitude of the chief beneficiary. Bats catch mosquitoes, 



