202 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
in its essence a romance; the author thought 
proper to cast it in the form of a realistic novel, 
and to make the teller of the story a clear-headed, 
calm, critical onlooker of mature age, one of the 
highest attainments in biological science who is 
nothing if not philosophical. 
How strange that this superior person should 
select and greatly exaggerate for the purposes of 
his narrative one of the stupid prejudices and 
superstitions of the vulgar he is supposed to 
despise! Like the vulgar who are without light 
he hates a snake, and it is to him, as to the meanest 
peasant, typical of the spirit of evil and a thing 
accurst. This unphilosophical temper (the super- 
stitious belief in the serpent’s enmity to man), 
with perhaps too great a love of the picturesque, 
have inspired some of the passages in the book 
_ which make the snakist smile. Let me quote one, 
in which the hero’s encounter with a huge Crotalus 
in a mountain cave is described. 
His look was met by the glitter of two diamond eyes, 
small, sharp, cold, shining out of the darkness, but gliding 
with a smooth and steady motion towards the light, and 
himself. He stood fixed, struck dumb, staring back into 
them with dilating pupils and sudden numbness of fear 
that cannot move, as in a terror of dreams. The two 
sparks of fire came forward until they grew to circles of 
flame, and all at once lifted themselves up in angry sur- 
prise. Then for the first time trilled in Mr. Barnard’s ears 
the dreadful sound which nothing that breathes, be it 
man or brute, can hear unmoved—the loud, long stinging 
whir, as the huge thick-bodied reptile shook his many- 
jointed rattle, and adjusted his loops for the fatal stroke. 
