CHAPTER II. 



SNAKES OF FICTION AND OF FACT. 



IN a celebrated lecture on * Snakes,' given by Mr. Ruskin 

 at the London Institution in March 1880, he intro- 

 duced his subject with the three considerations: 'What has 

 been thought about them ? ' * What is truly known about 

 them?' — extremely little, as he suggested; — and, 'What is 

 wisely asked about them, and what is desirable to know ? ' 



The three questions exactly agree with the object of my 

 work, this chapter especially ; and I will invite my readers 

 to seek in their own minds the answer to the first question, 

 which will also furnish a solution to the second, and, I 

 trust, incite some interest in the third. 



The learned lecturer carried us through the realms of 

 fancy, to conjure up all the grotesque creatures which, under 

 the name of ' serpents,' have figured in heraldry and mytho- 

 logy. By these, and by the light of the poets of old, and 

 in later times through the naturalists of the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries, we learn what a ' serpent ' was to 

 them, and what it included. In remote antiquity it was 

 an embodiment of the hideous and the terrible ; and in 



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