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 



