37'J COMMON VIPER. 



The Viper, though so much dreaded on account 

 df its bite, has beeti very highly esteemed, both by the 

 ancients and moderns, in a medical view, and used 

 as a restorative and strengthening diet. This idea 

 seems to have originated from the animal's casting 

 its skin, like other snakes, and thus appearing, as 

 it were, in a state of renovated youth ; and the 

 Snake being made the emblem of health, and con- 

 secrated to ^Esculapius, must have depended on the 

 same idea. The ancients used the flesh of the 

 Viper in leprous and other cases. The Greek 

 physician Crater us, mentioned so often by Cicero 

 in his epistles to Atticus, cured, as Porphyrius 

 relates, a miserable slave, whose skin in a strange 

 manner fell off from his bones, by advising him 

 to feed on Viper's flesh in the manner of fish. 

 Antonius Musa, physician to Octavius Ccesar 

 (Augustus), is said by Pliny to have ordered the 

 eating of Vipers in the case of otherwise incurable 

 ulcers, which by this method were quickly healed. 

 Galen says that those who are afflicted with Ele- 

 phantiasis are wonderfully relieved by eating Vi- 

 per's flesh dressed like eels ; and relates very re- 

 markable cures of this disease performed by means 

 of viper wine. Aretasus, who probably lived about 

 the same time with Galen, and who of all the an- 

 cients has most accurately described the above 

 disorder, commends, as Craterus did, the eating 

 of Vipers instead of fish in the same diseases. 

 Lopez, in his History of Congo, says the negroes 

 eat roasted adders, and account them a most deli- 

 cious food. In India the Cobra de Capello is said 



