Non Arabum volucer serpens, innataque rubris
Æquoribus custos pretiosæ vipera conchæ
Aut viventis adhuc Lybici membrana cerastæ.—
Pharsalia, Book vi. 677.
[196] The popular illustrations of the Story of the Black and White Snakes given by him, a favourite story among the Chinese, always represent them as winged. Folk Lore of China, N. P. Dennys, Ph.D.
[197] Broderip, Zoological Recreations, p. 333.
[198] Compare Shakspeare, “Peace, Kent. Come not between the Dragon and his wrath.”
[199] Metamorphoses, Book iii. 35, translated by H. J. Riley; London, 1872.
[200] In reference to colours so bright as to be inconsistent with our knowledge of the ordinary colours of reptiles, it may be of interest to compare the description by D’Argensola—who wrote the history of the successive conquests of the Moluccas, by the Spaniards, Portuguese and Dutch—of a blue and golden saurian existing upon a volcanic mountain in Tarnate. “Il y a aussi sur cette montagne un grand lac d’eau douce, entouré d’arbres, dans lequel on voit de crocodiles azurés et dorés qui ont plus d’un brasse de longueur, et qui se plongent dans l’eau lors qu’ils entendent des hommes.”—D’Argensola, vol. iii. p. 4, translated from the Spanish, 3 vols.; J. Desbordes, Amsterdam, 1706. And Pliny, Nat. Hist., Book viii. chap. xxviii., speaks of lizards upon Nysa, a mountain of India, twenty-four feet long, their colour being either yellow, purple, or azure blue.
[201] Ovid, Fasti, Book iv. 501.
[202] These wood-cuts occur on [pp. 239, 240].
[203] Broderip, Zoological Recreations, p. 332.