184 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
unprepared. After being bitten he has had time 
to reflect on the possible, even probable, con- 
sequence, and to make due preparation for the 
end; and even at the last, although tortured to 
frenzy at intervals by strange unhuman agonies, 
however clouded with apprehensions his intellect 
may be, it is not altogether darkened and un- 
conscious of approaching dissolution. We know 
that men in other times have had no such fear of 
sudden death, that among the most advanced of 
the ancients some even regarded death from 
lightning-stroke as a signal mark of Heaven’s 
favour. We, on the contrary, greatly fear the 
lightning, seldom as it hurts; and the serpent 
and the lightning are objects of terror to us in 
about the same degree, and perhaps for the same 
reason. 
Thus any view which we may take of this 
widespread and irrational feeling is at once found 
to be so complicated with other feelings and matters 
affecting us that no convincing solution seems 
possible. Perhaps it would be as well to regard 
it as a compound of various elements: traditional 
feeling having its origin in the Hebrew narrative 
of man’s fall from imnocency and happiness; our 
ignorance concerning serpents and the amount of 
injury they are able to do us; and, lastly, our 
superstitious dread of swift and unexpected death. 
Sticklers for the simple—and to my mind erroneous 
—theory that a primitive instinct is under it all, 
may throw in something of that element if they 
