216 LEAVES FROM THE 



Wliose effect 

 Holds sucli an enmity with blood of man, 

 That ST\ift as quicksilver it courses through 

 The natural gates and allies of the bodv ; 



but if serpents were to be created as part of the system 

 of the universe — and the links in the animal chain would 

 be largely imperfect if such forms did not exist — it be- 

 came a necessity that some of the race should be so armed 

 in order to their taking their prey, and for their self- 

 preservation when attacked. 



Still, when one reads the catalogue of serpents which 

 Cato and his army encountered in the Libyan deserts, 

 where the poet* makes every bite of every serpent fol- 

 lowed by the death of a man, the visitation is startling. 

 And really this black list, from which it would seem that 

 the cerastes and the other deadly snakes were leagued 

 with Csesar (though it may be rather superfluous in 

 specific description, and the different ages and states of 

 one serpent may have been multiplied into many distinct 

 species), should not be looked on as a mere poetical 

 fiction ; for it was evidently dra^vn from nature, though 

 somewhat highly-coloured. 



Many hundred years after the Pharsalia was written, 

 Paul Herman had in his museum at Leyden preserved 

 in alcohol, and duly labelled and catalogaied, one veno- 

 mous serpent Avhose bite induced a deadly sleep, another 

 which killed by an unquenchable thirst, a third whose 

 injected poison was immediately followed by haemor- 

 rhages from all the pores of the body — so that the doomed 

 patient presented the appearance of that king in his 

 dpng hours who had revelled in the horrors of the St. 

 Bartholomew — and so on. 



Dr. Mead truly lays it down that, in all accidents of 

 this nature, the mischief does not stop at the part affected, 



* Lucan. 



