HOW TO KNOW THE REPTILES 



By DOUGLAS ENGLISH, B.A., F.R.P.S. 

 Author of " Wee Tim'rous Beasties," " Beasties Courageous," etc. 



THE ADDER, OR VIPER 



With Photographs by the Author 



IN my last article I touched on the movements, his hideous and deadly attack, 

 feeling of abhorrence which is pro- we have peculiarly sinister facts, 

 duced in many minds by the mere Science, however (unfortunately for 



sight of a limbless rep- 

 tile. Fear of the snake 

 (it sometimes masquer- 

 ades as reverence) 

 follows the stream of 

 history from its source. 

 We may assume that 

 long before history was 

 WTitten this fear was in 

 the making. We may 

 further assume, from its 

 persistence, that it has 

 justified itself. 



It is open to question 

 whether such a thing 

 as instinctive fear exists. 

 One school of thought 

 holds that all such emo- 

 tions as fear, hatred, 

 Icve, and so forth are 

 slowly acquired through 

 the influence of ex- 

 ample and education. 

 Neither education nor example, however, 

 can account for the tendency to acquire 

 such emotions being stronger in one 

 individual than in another, and the 

 tendency to regard common objects of 

 the country as the personifications of 

 abstract ideas is common to civilised and 

 uncivilised alike. It is to this that we 

 must attribute the ophiolatry of the 

 Bab^'lonians and Eg\^tians, which no 

 doubt ga\'e impetus to the orthodox 

 Hebrew conception of the serpent as the 

 embodiment of evil. 



Nor is such a conception fantastic. In 

 "the way of a serpent upon a rock," his 

 invisibility at rest, his subtle and insidious 



70 54^ 



AN ADDER FULL FACE. 



In this picture the chink in the rostral shield (centre ot upper lip), through which 



the tongue is projected while the mouth remains closed, can be seen. 



herself), has little to do with imagery, and, 

 from a scientific standpoint, we may 

 only regard the serpent as a remarkable 

 and extreme specialisation. 



Everything points to the Order Ophidia 

 (as we know it) being of comparatively 

 recent origin. Perhaps the oldest existent 

 types arc found in the Boas and Pythons 

 (non-venomous snakes), who retain some 

 vestiges of hind liml)s. The earliest 

 known record of a venomous snake comes 

 from the Miocene period. 



As might be supposed from the absence 

 of external limits, the skeleton of a snake 

 consists mainly of a skull and a \-ertebral 

 column. Both vertebrae and skull, how- 



