26 



SCIENCE 



[N. iS. Vol. XLIII. No. 1097 



dence corroborative of the above conclusion, 

 pointing, however, more specifically to India as 

 the location of man's early development. 



Reference is made to the general prevalence 

 of a deep-seated abhorrence of the serpent and 

 all serpent forms among the white race. This 

 abhorrence of serpents is really a deep-seated 

 animal instinct, which has survived long after 

 the conditions that gave it origin. 



Rational persons who are informed on the 

 subject know that the great majority of the 

 snakes to be encountered in this country are 

 entirely harmless, being without venom or 

 fangs; and indeed the writer has determined, 

 to his own satisfaction at least, that in this 

 particular region the only one of the snake 

 family that is a menace to human life is the 

 now rarely encountered Crotalus liorridus, 

 using the term in a generic sense. 



And yet, any intelligent person when un- 

 expectedly brought into close proximity to 

 any kind of a snake, large or small, venomouB 

 or non-venomous, or even a semblance of a 

 snake, is suddenly seized by a panic of horror 

 and fear, with an impulse to spring away out 

 of the serpent's reach as quickly as possible in 

 a sort of blind terror. 



The probable origin of this instinctive hor- 

 ror of serpents that still dominates the mind 

 of civilized man was during the countless gen- 

 erations when early man was slowly climbing 

 up from his animal ancestry to his present 

 eminence as Homo sapiens. Being without 

 fire and without clothing or shelter, he was 

 peculiarly defenseless in an environment beset 

 by deadly serpents, against this, probably the 

 greatest danger and greatest menace to racial 

 survival that he had to encoujiter. Hence his 

 instinctive horror of the serpent form. 



The idea that India was the " cradle " of the 

 white race at least, with its serpent environ- 

 ment threatening racial existence for a very 

 long period of its primitive development, ap- 

 pears to receive some degree of confirmation 

 from the fact that among the inhabitants of 

 India at the present time the annual m.ortality 

 from attacks of serpents exceeds twenty thou- 

 sand, notwithstanding the efforts of the British 

 authorities to suppress the evil. 



The serpent instinct in man has a close anal- 

 ogy in a similar instinct that characterizes 

 the domestic horse of the present time, to 

 which allusion has been made by writers on 

 the subject. It is a familiar fact to every one 

 who has to do with horses, the proneness of the 

 horse to exhibit an insane and uncontrollable 

 fear of any unfamiliar wayside object. Indeed 

 the phenomenon is such a commonplace that 

 probably very few persons have given a thought 

 in explanation of what appears to be a wholly 

 unaccountable mystery. 



The suggestion that has been offered with 

 compelling force to account for this curious 

 horse instinct is on parallel lines with that 

 offered above to account for man's serpent in- 

 stinct, both of which in the nature of animal 

 instincts are intense and deep seated, and have 

 long survived the conditions that gave rise to 

 them. 



In the case of the horse, for a very long pe- 

 riod of his racial development he was sub- 

 jected to one danger exceeding all others in 

 magnitude by which racial survival was con- 

 stantly threatened. This danger was embodied 

 in the predacious beasts that infested the 

 horse's early environment, mainly of the feline 

 family, that lay in wait concealed by bushes or 

 other cover for the opportunity to spring upon 

 him and devour him. The horse had no means 

 of defense against this danger except alertness 

 in eluding the spring of his enemy and fleet- 

 ness of foot to escape pursuit. The individual 

 horses that developed these qualities most 

 highly survived, while those that failed to 

 reach an efficient standard fell victims to their 

 enemies. 



And we now see, thousands of years after 

 the domestication of the horse, that he sud- 

 denly falls into a senseless panic and flees at 

 breakneck speed from an imaginary danger 

 behind him, heedless of real dangers ahead 

 which not infrequently cause him a broken 

 neck. 



The instinctive fear of imaginary dangers 

 in the horse, and the same kind of fear of ser- 

 pents in man, appear to have had a similar 

 genesis in the early experiences of both races. 



T. G. Dabney 



