“Let us pass on to the common snakes. These have no venomous fangs in the jaw; their teeth are small and even and lacking in strength, useful as an aid in holding the captured prey and helping in the swallowing of it (which is as difficult as with the viper), but incapable of inflicting a serious wound. These creatures, too, are extremely timid, fleeing at the slightest alarm; but if retreat is cut off they put on a bold front to impose on the enemy, coiling themselves in a spiral, erecting the head, swaying this way and that, hissing, and trying to bite. There is no need, however, to be afraid; a scratch of no more importance than a pin-prick would be the worst that could befall one. You would suffer far [[265]]greater injury by thrusting your hand into a bramble-bush.”
“If it isn’t any more dangerous than that,” Jules declared boldly, “I shan’t mind taking up snakes in my hands.”
“I do not tell you this to encourage you to capture these creatures and make playthings of them; on the contrary, I wish you to leave them alone, but I also desire to remove an unwarranted fear, the fear of snakes that is so prevalent in country districts. Fear, always an evil counselor, never does a good deed in prompting one to throw stones at a harmless creature found in a hole in the wall. The passer-by attacks it with his stick if he sees it crossing the road, and the mower in the hay-field cuts off its head with his scythe. Were they not listening to a foolish fear and yielding to an unreasonable dislike, they would leave the poor thing in peace and no one would be the worse for it, as snakes not only are harmless, but they render us excellent service by destroying numerous insects and small rodents such as meadow-mice and field-mice. From this point of view, snakes deserve protection and not the hatred that is commonly felt for them.”
“But,” objected Louis, “they say snakes can charm birds by their gaze and draw them into their open mouth by first overcoming them with their poisonous breath. Helpless, the bird plunges headlong into the creature’s horrible gullet.”
“There is a grain of truth in what you say, but far more untruth, the result of popular superstition [[266]]which deliberately credits the serpent with sorcery. In the first place, the breath of a serpent, or of any reptile whatever, has nothing poisonous about it, nothing magically attractive, nothing supernatural. You all have too much common sense to make it necessary for me to dwell on these ridiculous tales. There remains only the belief that the bird is charmed by the reptile’s hard, fixed gaze. The marvel of this amounts in reality to very little.
“Some of our snakes are very fond of birds’ eggs. They climb trees, search out the nests, and eat the eggs when the mothers are not there to protect them. More than one human nest-robber who thought he was seizing a jay’s or a blackbird’s brood has put his hand instead on the cold coiled body of a reptile in the bottom of the nest. I have even known instances in which the plunderers, seized with horror at this unexpected encounter, fell backward from the tree-top and did not come out of the adventure without broken bones. A warning to others. The larger snakes do not content themselves with eggs, but devour the young birds as well, even those that are outside the nest when they can catch them, which fortunately is not easy. Imagine an innocent little bird surprised by a snake in the underbrush. The poor little thing suddenly sees before it a mouth horribly wide open and glittering eyes regarding it steadily. Scared almost to death, the bird loses its head and is powerless to take flight. In vain it beats its wings, cries plaintively, and finally falls from the branch, paralyzed and dying. [[267]]The monster lying in wait catches the poor thing in its mouth.
“The power to charm that serpents are supposed to have is therefore in reality only the power so to terrify a bird that it cannot fly. We ourselves, on being suddenly confronted by an appalling danger—do we always retain the presence of mind necessary to face it? Are there not plenty of persons that get bewildered, lose their wits completely, and make matters worse by acting foolishly? The charm exerted by serpents all comes down simply to that. I am inclined to believe that a bird, on being surprised by a snake, usually is able to overcome the first feeling of terror and to take flight as soon as it sees the reptile’s horrible gullet yawning to receive the expected prey; and so the serpent’s attempt to paralyze its victim has a chance to succeed only with very young and inexperienced birds. What paralyzes with fright an ignorant young nestling hardly affects a bird that is master of itself; what terrifies a child or a person of weak character makes little impression on a man capable of keeping his head in time of danger. Acquire the habit, children, of keeping calm in times of danger or excitement, and you will avoid many calamities and escape many perils, just as the bird that does not lose its head escapes the snake lurking in ambush to catch it.
“One of our common snakes is the water-snake, so called because it likes damp places and frequents still water, where it shows itself a good swimmer in its pursuit of little fish, water insects, and tadpoles. [[268]]It lays its eggs usually in dunghills, where they will be hatched out by the heat. These eggs are of an elongated oval shape, with a soft shell resembling wet parchment. In size they are about as large as a magpie’s eggs. They are joined together in a string by a semi-liquid viscous substance. On stirring a heap of dung, country people often turn up with their forks these soft-shelled eggs whose origin is unknown to them and from which, to their great surprise, come young serpents. They declare them to be roosters’ eggs, unnatural eggs, magic eggs that produce snakes instead of chickens; and it would be difficult to convince them that this is not true. As for you, my children, if you ever happen to hear any one speak of eggs laid by roosters in dunghills and producing serpents, remember that they are simply the eggs of the water-snake.
“Put no faith, either, in still another fable current in our villages. According to this, all snakes have a consuming desire to enter the mouth and then the body of any one sleeping on the cool grass. To rid the patient of this inconvenient guest the serpent must be lured from its retreat by the smell of warm milk. Of course this is pure nonsense, as no animal can wish to take refuge in the human stomach, where it would be digested, reduced to pap, by the same process that digests our bread.
“One often meets in hay-fields or even in hay itself a small reptile differing from the snake in structure. It is known as the slow-worm or blind-worm. Its head is small and merges into the body [[269]]without narrowing into a neck; furthermore, the tail is blunt, so that the two ends of the body are of nearly the same shape and leave us for a moment in doubt as to which is the head and which the tail. The slow-worm is covered with very smooth and shiny scales. The back is silvery yellow and marked from one end to the other by three black lines which change, as the worm grows older, to a succession of dots and even disappear entirely at last. The stomach is blackish. On being disturbed the slow-worm forcibly contracts, stiffens, and becomes almost as rigid as a lizard’s tail.