146 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
imparted in any way. That which we seek is not 
the viper, the subject of Fontana’s monumental 
work, the little rope of clay or dead flesh in the 
British Museum, coiled in its bottle of spirits, and 
labelled “ Vipera berus, Linn.” 
We seek the adder or nadder, that being 
venerated of old and generator of the sacred 
adder-stone of the Druids, and he dwells not in a 
jar of alcohol in the still shade and equable tem- 
perature of a museum. He is a lover of the sun, 
and must be sought for after his winter sleep in 
dry incult places, especially in open forest-lands, 
stony hill-sides and furze- grown heaths and 
commons. After a little training the adder-seeker 
gets to know a viperish locality by its appearance. 
It is, however, not necessary to go out at random 
in search of a suitable hunting-ground, seeing that 
all places haunted by adders are well known to 
the people in the neighbourhood, who are only too 
ready to give the information required. There are 
no preservers of adders in the land, and so far as 
I know there has been but one person in England 
to preserve that beautiful and innocuous creature, 
the ringed-snake. Can any one understand such 
a hobby or taste? Certainly not that friend of 
animals who pays sixpence for a dead snake. 
He, the snake-saviour, our unknown little 
Melampus, paid his village boys sixpence for every 
one they brought to him alive and uninjured, and 
to inspire confidence in them he would go with 
half a dozen large snakes in his coat pockets into 
