202 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



in its essence a romance ; the author thought 

 proper to cast it in the form of a realistic novel, 

 and to make the teller of the story a clear-headed, 

 calm, critical onlooker of mature age, one of the 

 highest attainments in biological science who is 

 nothing if not philosophical. 



How strange that this superior person should 

 select and greatly exaggerate for the purposes of 

 his narrative one of the stupid prejudices and 

 superstitions of the vulgar he is supposed to 

 despise ! Like the vulgar who are without light 

 he hates a snake, and it is to him, as to the meanest 

 peasant, typical of the spirit of evil and a thing 

 accurst. This unphilosophical temper (the super- 

 stitious belief in the serpent's enmity to man), 

 with perhaps too great a love of the picturesque, 

 have inspired some of the passages in the book 

 which make the snakist smile. Let me quote one, 

 in which the hero's encounter with a huge Crotalus 

 in a mountain cave is described. 



His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, 

 small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding 

 with a smooth and steady motion towards the light, and 

 himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb, staring back into 

 them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear 

 that cannot move, as in a terror of dreams. The two 

 sparks of fire came forward until they grew to circles of 

 flame, and all at once lifted themselves up in angry sur- 

 prise. Then for the first time trilled in Mr. Barnard's ears 

 the dreadful sound which nothing that breathes, be it 

 man or brute, can hear unmoved the loud, long stinging 

 whir, as the huge thick-bodied reptile shook his many- 

 jointed rattle, and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. 



