HORNED SNAKE. 581 



rastes. It should seem very natural for any one, who, from mo- 

 tives of distress, has resolved to put a period to his existence, 

 especially women, and weak persons, unaccustomed to handle 

 arms, to seek the gentlest method to free themselves from the 

 load of life now become insupportable. This, howevef, has not 

 always been the case with the ancients. Arria, Pcetus's wife, 

 stabbed herself with a dagger, to set her husband an example to 

 die, with this memorable assurance, after giving herself the blow, 

 Pectus, it is not painful! Porcia, the wife of Brutus, died by 

 the barbarous, and not obvious way of perishing, by swallowing 

 fire; the violent agitation of spirits prevailing over the momentary 

 difference in the suffering. It is not to be doubted but that a wo- 

 man, high-spirited like Cleopatra, was also above the momentary 

 differences in feeling ; and had the way in which she died not been 

 ordinary and usual, she certainly would not have applied herself 

 to the invention of anew one. We are therefore to look upon her 

 dying by the bite of the cerastes, as only following the manner of 

 death which she had seen adopted by those who intended to die 

 without torment. Galen, speaking of the aspic in the great city 

 of Alexandria, says, I have seen how speedily they (the aspics) 

 occasioned death. Whenever any person is condemned to die 

 whom they wish to end quickly and without torment, they put the 

 viper to his breast, and suffering him there to creep a little, the 

 man is presently killed. Pausanias speaks of particular serpents 

 that were to be found in Arabia, among the balsam-trees, several 

 of which I procured, both alive and dead, when I brought the tree 

 from Beder unein ; but they were still the same species of ser- 

 pent, only some from sex, and some from want of age, had not the 

 horns, though in every other respect they could not be mistaken. 

 Ibn Sina, called by the Europeans Avicenna, has described this 

 animal very exactly. He says it is frequent in Schem (that is, the 

 the country about the south of Damascus), and also in Egypt ; and 

 he makes a very good observation on their manners ; that they do 

 not go or walk straight, but by contracting themselves ; but in the 

 latter part of his description he seems not to have known the serpent 

 he is speaking of, because he says its bite is cured in the same man- 

 ner as that of the viper and cerastes, by which it is implied that 

 the animal he was describing was not a cerastes, and the cerastes is 

 not a viper, both of which assertions are false. 



u A long dissertation," adds Mr. Bruce, M would remain on 

 2 p3 



