IN a celebrated lecture on ‘Snakes,’ given by Mr. Ruskin at the London Institution in March 1880, he introduced his subject with the three considerations: ‘What has been thought about them?’ ‘What is truly known about them?’—extremely little, as he suggested;—and, ‘What is wisely asked about them, and what is desirable to know?’
The three questions exactly agree with the object of my work, this chapter especially; and I will invite my readers to seek in their own minds the answer to the first question, which will also furnish a solution to the second, and, I trust, incite some interest in the third.
The learned lecturer carried us through the realms of fancy, to conjure up all the grotesque creatures which, under the name of ‘serpents,’ have figured in heraldry and mythology. By these, and by the light of the poets of old, and in later times through the naturalists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we learn what a ‘serpent’ was to them, and what it included. In remote antiquity it was an embodiment of the hideous and the terrible; and in spite of Aristotle (a comparatively recent authority), dragons and such-like chimærical creatures have pervaded the mind both of the erudite and the ignorant, in association with serpents, till within three hundred years, and are not even yet altogether discarded.
Nor am I inclined to believe that the terror-inspiring representations of classic days are so unreal as might be supposed. Palæontology is continually bringing to light new evidences of the presence of man on the earth in ages far remote; and we do not know for certain what strange forms of animal life were his contemporaries, or when the faculty of speech was so far developed in him as to enable him to learn about his predecessors, which were still more terrible. We do know that fossils of mammoth creatures, passing strange, are coeval with fossil human remains, and to those early types of humanity a knowledge of still stranger creatures of reptilian forms may have been handed down from mouth to mouth; for there is generally a germ of truth at the root of a myth. Fossil remains tell us of the gigantic forms of ancient reptiles, or compound reptile-fish or reptile-birds, and quadrupeds which have gradually diminished in size or become altogether extinct as our own period has been approached.
Said Professor Huxley, at the British Association in 1878, ‘Within the last twenty years we have an astonishing accumulation of evidence of the existence of man in ages antecedent to those of which we have any historical record. Beyond all question, man, and what is more to the purpose, intelligent man, existed at a time when the whole physical conformation of the country was totally different from that which now characterizes it.’
Did these intelligent beings know anything of the Dinotherium (dreadful beast), or the Dinornis (dreadful bird), or any other of those fearful forms which have furnished historic ages with a dragon?
Coming down to our own era, and the time when travel and education first induced the observation and study of animals with a view to learn their habits, and to arrange them under some system of classification, we begin to see the perplexities that presented themselves to naturalists, especially with regard to egg-producing creatures. To Topsell, a writer of the seventeenth century, every creeping or crawling thing was ‘a Serpente,’ and many insects were included in his category. To Lawson, on the contrary, every egg-producing creature, if not a bird, was an ‘Insect.’ In his History of Carolina, 1709, he describes, under ‘Insects of Carolina,’ all the snakes he saw, also the alligators, lizards, etc., and thus continues: ‘The Reptiles or smaller Insects are too numerous to relate here, the Country affording innumerable quantities thereof; as the Flying Stags with Horns, Beetles, Butterflies, Grasshoppers, Locusts, and several hundred of uncouth Shapes.’ Having thus gone through the ‘Insects,’ except the ‘Eel-snake’ (which turns out to be a ‘Loach’ or leech), he gets puzzled over a ‘Tortois, vulgarly called Turtle, which I have ranked among the Insects, because they lay Eggs, and I did not know well where to put them.’ And Lawson was not alone in not knowing ‘where to put’ a countless number of other creatures that go to form the endless links in the long chain of living organisms; even plants, which, to use Darwin’s words, ‘with animals, though most remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex relations.’ You may place the dove at one end of the chain and the crocodile at the other, without one broken link. The earliest bird which palæontology has revealed had teeth in its bill, claws on the end of its wings, and a long tail with feathers growing out of it, like a pinnate leaf.
We see those strange forms reproduced in the gardens of the Crystal Palace. Lizards with the head of a bird and other combinations, the Pterosauria or winged-lizards, Ichthyosauria or fish-lizards, of which some representative types still exist in the African Lepidosiren and the Mexican Axolotl, which have puzzled modern physiologists as much as the Carolina tortoise puzzled Lawson; for whether to call them reptiles or fishes was long a disputed question. Dr. Carpenter, in his Zoology, reckons fifty-eight of such links among reptiles; as, for instance, the transition from turtles to crocodiles, from tortoises to lizards, in which latter we find the legs growing shorter, till they are gone altogether in the blindworms and amphisbænas. These again branch off to the cecilias, and the cecilias to worms on one side, and to frogs on the other, having the form of a snake, but the skin of the batrachian. There are the Ophiosaurians, snake-lizards, and Saurophidians, lizard-snakes; there are lizard-like frogs and frog-like lizards; some of them beginning life with gills, and becoming air-breathers afterwards, others of saurian aspect retaining their gills through life; and from these, again, is the transition between reptiles and fishes. There are diminutive snakes of worm-like aspect, and gigantic worms which might be mistaken for snakes; and among modern naturalists, that is to say within one hundred years, worms have been classed with reptiles when none such enormous species as those lately found in Africa were dreamed of.
There is in no branch of zoology so much confusion as in herpetology; and if the reader will, with a sweep of the imagination, embrace the innumerable forms that come under the class Reptilia, their various coverings, and their close gradations, he will not wonder at this. Let us glance at a few of the systems adopted by Linnæus and others of his time, who, we must remember, had to combat not only inherited ideas of ‘creeping things,’ but the difficulties presented by badly stuffed or bottled specimens; the latter often having been so long in alcohol that their colours had flown, or their covering changed in texture. The Atlantic was not crossed in a week in those days; and three months, instead of three weeks, barely sufficed to reach India, to say nothing of inland journeys when you got there. If foreign specimens came home after the manipulations of a taxidermist, he had done his very best to render them as hideous as tradition painted them. Sometimes a wooden head on a stuffed body; teeth that might furnish the jaws of the largest felines, and a tongue to match; while with external cleansings, scrapings, and polishings, it were hard to discover what manner of skin had originally clothed the creature.
Carefully chosen was Aristotle’s name for reptiles, ‘the terrestrial, oviparous, sanguineous animals;’ for those which we are considering, breathe by lungs, and are therefore red-blooded. Cuvier divided the egg-producing animals into oviparous quadrupeds (lizards, turtles, crocodiles, and frogs); bipeds, the birds; insects and serpents. Linnæus—who, by the way, preceded Cuvier—called all reptiles ‘amphibious animals,’ of which serpents were the second order, those ‘without limbs.’ He also divided them into orders, genera, and species; but in the Ophidia was guided too much by the scales, which has caused confusion ever since, as both poisonous and harmless snakes often present similar characters in this respect.