34} CLASS REPTILIA. 



Serpents have been found in the East Indies more than 

 fifty feet in length. When these enormous serpents creep 

 along, one might well imagine that it was the great trunk of 

 a pine-tree, or the mast of a man of war, advancing, and 

 winding through the bushes, and leaving immense furrows 

 behind it. We are told by the Roman historian, that Regu- 

 lus found betv/een Carthage and Utica a monstrous serpent, 

 which darted on the soldiers when they went to draw water 

 from the river. It strangled them in its folds, and stifled and 

 poisoned them with its breath. No darts could pierce its 

 scales, which were as brilliant as brass. Catapultas, and 

 other machines of war, were raised against it. Its spine was 

 thus broken by an immense fragment of rock, discharged 

 with great violence ; but it even still remained formidable to 

 the army, whose cohorts had some difficulty in despatching 

 it. Regulus sent its skin to Rome, which was a hundred and 

 twenty feet in length. When Cato traversed Lybia with the 

 wrecks of the army of Pompey, he was surrounded by a 

 multitude of serpents, by whose deadly bites great numbers 

 of his warriors perished, whose sufferings have been sublimely 

 depicted by the majestic pen of Lucan. The poets, to explain 

 the abundance of serpents and other reptiles in the Lybian 

 sands, have invented the fable, to which we before alluded, 

 that the blood which dropped from the head of Medusa, cut 

 off by Perseus, was changed into these animals : — 



" Gorgonei capitis guttae cecidere cruentas 



Quas humus exceptas varios animavit in angues 

 Unde frequens ilia est, infestaque terra colubris." 



Ovid, Met. iv. 



The external coverings of reptiles present general characters 

 not difficult of distinction. If all the viviparous quadrupeds 

 are, more or less, covered with hair, and birds with feathers 

 or a warm and light down, at least on some parts of their 

 bodies, nothing similar is ever found among oviparous qua- 



