298 The Animal-Lore of ShaJcspeare’s Time. 
The cruel scorpion comes to climb the pile, 
And meeting with the greedy crocodile, 
Into the ark together meekly go, 
And like kind mates themselves they there bestow 
The dart and dipsas, to th’ ark coming in. 
Infold each other as they were a twin; 
The cockatrice there kills not with his sight, 
But in his object joys, and in the light 
The deadly killing aspick when he seeth 
This world of creatures sheaths his poyson’d teeth, 
And with the adder and the speckled snake. 
Them to a corner harmlessly betake; 
The lizard shuts up his sharp-sighted eyes, 
Among these serpents, and there sadly lies ; 
The small-eyed slow-worm held of many blind. 
Yet this great ark it quickly out could find, 
And as the ark it was about to climb, 
Out of its teeth shoots the invenom’d slime. 
***'*• * 
All these base, grovelling, and ground-licking sute, 
From the large boas, to the little newte; 
As well as birds, or the four footed beasts, 
Came to the ark their hostry as Noah’s guests.” 
(Noah’s Flood.) 
The statement made by G-iraldus Cambrensis, that 
Ireland possessed an immunity from every kind of 
poisonous creature, has been repeated by almost all sub¬ 
sequent writers on that country. This notion can be 
traced back as early as the “ venerable Bede,” who writes,, 
in his Ecclesiastical Histonj (book i., c. i.):— 
“ No reptile is found there; no serpent can live there; for, though 
often carried thither out of Britain, as soon as the ship draws near the 
land, and the scent of the air from off the shore reaches them, they 
die. On the contrary almost all things produced in the island have- 
virtues against poison.” 
Cambrensis, who quotes this passage, confirms the 
statement, and declares that, though some authors have 
