178 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
come down to him as a tradition—that these most 
violent odours emanate from animals that cannot 
harm him. 
So much for this view. On the other hand, our 
enmity to the serpent, which often exists together 
with a mythic and anthropomorphic belief in the 
serpent’s enmity to us, might be regarded as 
purely traditional, having its origin in the 
Scriptural narrative of man’s disobedience and 
expulsion from Paradise. Whether we believe with 
theologians that our great spiritual enemy was 
the real tempter, who merely made use of the 
serpent’s form as a convenient disguise in which 
to approach the woman, or take without gloss the 
simple story as it stands in Genesis, which only 
says that the serpent was the most subtle of all 
things made and the sole cause of our undoing, 
the result for the creature is equally disastrous. 
A mark is set upon him: “ Because thou hast done 
this thing thou art cursed above all cattle, and 
above every beast of the field; upon thy belly 
shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days 
of thy life: and I will place enmity between thy 
seed and her seed; and it shall bruise thy head, 
and thou shalt bruise its heel.” This prophecy, so 
far as it tells against the creature, has been literally 
fulfilled. 
The Satanic theory concerning snakes—that 
“destructive delusion,” which Sir Thomas Browne 
shrewdly remarks, “hath much enlarged the 
opinion of their mischief ’—makes it necessary for 
