CHAPTER IV. 

 SNAKES IN TRADITION. 



TRADITIONS, whether ancient or modern, all conspire to 

 make the serpent-folk inhabitants either of a subterranean 

 darkness or of the earth's most desolate places, black 

 creviced rocks and rotting vegetation, blistering desert sands 

 and festering swamps. They are the outlaws of animal 

 society. Erebus and lower Orcus and Tartarus below Hades 

 know them. They are familiars of the gloomy shades by 

 Styx, in the caverned banks of Acheron and Cocytus, the 

 Cimmerian darkness beside Avernus. And wherever we 

 find them, they are the rejected of creation, and for ever 

 grovelling upon their bellies and sulkily tracing upon the 

 dust the hieroglyphic record of the original curse. 



Yet how differently the lives of these splendid and 

 powerful beings are really passed. What creatures revel in 

 more exquisite vegetation of leaf and blossom than the boas, 

 anacondas, and pythons? and do not snakes share with 

 fish their abodes in sea and river and lake ? Indeed, there 

 is no family of wild life that traverses so completely every 

 experience of delightful habitation. 



Nor does tradition sufficiently set forth the great snake- 

 parable, with its awful significances of latent mischief, 

 ambushed in such beauty. " Not even the plumage of the 

 Birds of Paradise can excel the purples, blues, and gold of a 

 python that has just cast its slough, while an infinite and 

 terrible interest underlies those iridescent charms from the 



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