Snakes in Nature. 37 



disorder, and yet in order too, all the grotesque things that 

 heraldry owns, and the old world in days past knew so much 

 of; the wyvern, with its vicious cast of countenance, but 

 inadequate stomach ; the spiny and always rampant dragon- 

 kind ; the hydra, unhappy beast that must have suffered 

 from such a multitudinous toothache ; the crowned basilisk, 

 king of the reptiles and chiefest of vermin ; the gorgon, with 

 snakes for hair ; and the terrible echidna ; the cockatrice, fell 

 worm, whose first glance was petrifaction, and whose second 

 death ; the salamander, of such subtle sort that he digested 

 flame ; the chimaera, shapeless, yet deadly ; the dread cer- 

 astes; the aspic, "pretty worm of Nilus," fatal as lightning and 

 as swift ; and the dypsas, whose portentous aspect sufficed to 

 hold the path against an army of Rome's choicest legion. 

 From astronomy, where Serpentarius, baleful constellation, 

 glitters, and Draco refulgent rears his impossible head, the 

 speaker could run through all the forms of dragon idealism, 

 recalling to his audience, as he went on his way, beset with 

 " unspeakable " monsters, the poems of the Greek and of yet 

 older mythologies, churning up the old waters with a Shesh 

 of his own, and summoning into sight at the sound of his pipe 

 all the music-loving reptiles of mythology, like one of the old 

 Psylli or the Marmarids, or one of the Magi, sons of Chus, 

 'tame, at whose voices, spellbound, the dread cerastes lay.' 

 " The snakes of antiquity, it is true, have come down to 

 us dignified, and made terrible by the honours and fears of 

 past ages, when the Egyptians and the Greeks bound the 

 aspic round the head of the idol as the most regal of tiaras, 

 and crowned in fancy the adder and the asp ; when nations 

 tenanted their sacred groves with even more sacred serpents : 

 entrusted to their care all that kings held most precious, 

 and the gems which the jealous earth still held undug ; 

 deifying some of their worms, and giving the names of 

 others to their gods. But the actual facts known to science 

 of modern snakes, the deadlier sort of the ophidians, invest 



