154 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
instincts. . . . There are such things as natural myths 
. the dark sayings of men may be difficult to read, and 
not always worth reading; but the dark sayings of nature 
will probably become clearer for the looking into, and will 
very certainly be worth reading. And, indeed, all guidance 
to the right sense of the human and variable myths will 
probably depend on our first getting at the sense of the 
natural and invariable ones. . . . Is there indeed no 
tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips, in that 
running brook of horror on the ground? Why that horror? 
We all feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how dispropor- 
tioned to the real strength of the creature! . . . But 
that horror is of the myth, not of the creature; . . . it 
is the strength of the base element that is so dreadful in: 
the serpent; it is the omnipotence of the earth. . . . It 
is a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth, 
of the entire earthly nature. 
Of the animal’s motions he says: 
That rivulet of smooth silver—how does it flow, think 
you? It literally rows on the earth, with every scale for 
an oar; it bites the dust with the ridges of its body. 
Watch it when it moves slowly; a wave, but, without 
wind! a current, but with no fall! all the body moving 
at the same instant, yet some of it to one side, some to 
another, and some forward, and the rest of the coil back- 
wards; but all with the same calm will and equal way 
—no contraction, no extension; one soundless, causeless 
march of sequent rings, a spectral procession of spotted 
dust, with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its coils. 
Startle it: the winding stream will become a twisted 
arrow; the wave of poisoned life will lash through the 
grass like a cast lance. 
He adds: “TI cannot understand this forward 
motion of the snake,” which is not strange, seeing 
that Solomon, the wise man, found in “ the way of 
a serpent upon a rock” one of the three wonderful 
