6go Analyses of Books. [November, 
lies in the fad that all vegetables, except some families of para- 
sitic plants, and perhaps some species described as carnivorous 
plants, feed alone on inorganic matter, while animals derive their 
sustenance from organised matter.” But surely a distinction 
which admits such exceptions as are here fully acknowledged 
can neither be grand nor obvious. If bacteria, &c., were not 
nourished upon organic matter, how could they either decompose 
the remains of plants and animals or induce diseases? 
“ Zoological Enigmas ” is a collection of curious but little- 
known facts in Natural History. The existence of a land serpent 
of 55 feet in length, like the ular sawad which Sir Stamford 
Raffles saw on the coast of Sumatra, is often forgotten. As for 
the huge serpents said to have occurred in Europe within histo- 
rical times we feel very sceptical. “ Pliny states that a serpent 
killed in the Pontine Marshes, during the reign of the Emperor 
Claudius, had the entire body- of a child in its stomach; and 
Suetonius mentions a python 50 cubits (75 feet) in length, that 
was killed near Agrigentum in Sicily, and exhibited in front of 
the Comition.” Pliny, however, is an exceedingly poor authority, 
as in compiling his great work he seems to have gathered up 
every old wives’ fable that came to his ears, without any attempt 
at verification. 
The story of the serpent which, in Numidia, kept a whole 
Roman army at bay on a ford of the Bagrada, and after killing 
fourteen soldiers who had attacked it with their swords was at 
last crushed by a stone hurled from a balista, is more credible as 
far as the locality is concerned. Even down to the present day 
huge serpents are said to haunt some of the ravines of the 
Atlas. 
We have next reference to the Brazilian tradition of a 
monstrous underground serpent which tunnels its way under the 
roots of the forest, or occasionally overturns large trees. But 
some versions of the story seem to point rather to a monstrous 
earthworm. This myth is, we believe, being specially investi- 
gated by Dr. Fritz Muller, F.E.S. 
The classical myth of the harpy is traced, with great proba- 
bility, to the “ flying fox ” of Java and other parts of the Malay 
Archipelago. 
Lastly, the author of this paper discusses the belief in vam- 
pires. This belief, in various forms, is widely current in 
Roumania, Hungary, the South of Russia, and even in Upper 
Silesia. A recent Hungarian writer contends that this notion 
has a zoological basis^ viz., “ the existence of nodturnal Mindes 
allied to the land-leeches of Ceylon, and gifted with the caution 
of the South-American vampire-bat, which Waterton so well 
describes. In support of this belief a strange story is given of 
certain mysterious deaths which had happened in a turret- 
chamber in the mansion of the Counts Lermonhoff, near Odessa. 
In 1824 a son of the family, eager to solve the mystery, slept in 
