OPHIDIA. 15:5 



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 ft'om 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 a hand, to the gaping slime-dropping mouth. 



It is truly wonderful to see the work of hands, feet, fins, performed by a simple 

 modification of the vertebral column — a multiplication of its joints, with mobility of its 

 ribs. But the vertebrse 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 colunm. 



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 hundred or three hundred 

 vertebrae 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 (fig. 15), the singular Fig. 15. 



density and thickness of the bones of the 

 cranium (i, 3, 7) strike us as a special pro- 

 vision against fracture and injury to the 

 head. When we contemplate the still 

 more remarkable manner in which these 

 bones are applied one over another, the 

 superoccipital (3) overlapping the cxocci- j^ ^^ j^, 



pital (2), and the parietal (7) overlapping Cranium of a Serpent, partially bisected. 



the superoccipital, the natural segments 



being sheathed one within the other, the occipital segment (1, 3) within the parietal 

 one (5-7), we cannot but discern a special adaptation in the structure of Serpents to 

 their commonly prone position, and a prevision of the dangers to which they were 

 subject from falling bodies and the tread of heavy beasts. I might enumerate many 

 other equally beautiful instances of design and foresight — the whole organization of the 

 Serpent is replete with such — in relation to the necessities of their apodal vermiform 

 character ; just as the snake-like eel is compensated l^y analogous modifications 

 amongst fishes, and the snake-like centipede amongst insects. 



