360 THE BIRD WATCHER 
my part, shall alway@#be pleased and interested to see 
them do so. I am greatly interested in snakes, and in 
reptiles generally. Their structure is wonderful, their 
powers are extraordinary, their ways and their habits, 
their whole life history, everything about them, is 
fascinating. They are not stupid, as they are erro- 
neously supposed to be, and those who have been 
brought into intimate relations with them have found 
them capable of great and enduring affection.’ For 
the sort of crusade, therefore, that has been got up 
against these maligned creatures, I altogether repudiate 
it, and I dissociate myself entirely from the many 
harsh, rude, unsympathetic and unappreciative things 
that have been said about them. Things, of course, 
are thus, or thus, according as we ourselves are, and 
snakes must be uninteresting indeed to some people, 
since—infandum !—in a place devoted, or that should 
be devoted, to the study of the living habits of the 
living animal, it is proposed, with a shout of 
“ Kureka!”, to substitute for the grace of motion 
and lithe sinuosity of the living serpent, its motionless, 
stuffed, dusty, dirty, faded, black, hard, cracky skin. 
A stuffed snake !—that awful production, from which 
all softness and smoothness is gone, out of which every 
intimate character is driven, from the very beginning, 
whilst the mere superficial resemblance fades slowly, 
day by day, till we have, at last, something like a vast 
1 See the uniquely interesting letter of Mr. Severn to the Times of July 25th, 
1872, as quoted by Romanes in his eAnimal Intelligence (International Scientific 
Series), pp. 260-2. 
