152 BRITISH FOSSIL REPTILES. 



as the progeny of a transmuted species, degraded from its originally created form as 

 the consequence and punishment of its instrumentality 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, " consisted, 1st, 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 : 2dly, in the meanness of his provision, 

 ' and dust shalt thou eat,' inasmuch 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, 1 742, 

 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 wdth 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 pre- 

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

 by the side of the sacred text, he would most probably restrict himself 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 terras 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 upon the wing ; thus all these creatures fall its prey. 



