It used to be believed, that the saliva of man was fatal to vipers, as their venom to ourselves; an opinion maintained by Aristotle, Galen, Varro, Pliny, and Figuier, the surgeon. The latter asserts that he killed a viper by the effect of his own saliva. The experiments by Redi, the learned physician of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and many others, proved the absurdity of the idea.
Benvenuto Cellini declares, in his Memoirs, that he saw a salamander in the midst of his own fire; probably a lizard, inadvertantly brought from the country among the logs of wood. No one has yet pleaded guilty to having seen a phœnix, though for ages, a popular superstition attached to this fabulous bird. The unicorn also continues to be placed among the apocryphal animals, with the great sea-serpent of the American coast.
The bite of the tarentula spider was long said to produce involuntary dancing; simply because the persons bitten, on applying to the local practitioners of the healing art, were instantly ordered to dance the pizzica, the rapid Sicilian dance of the provinces where the tarentula abounds, in order to promote circulation and neutralize the effects of the poison. Whole villages used to assemble to witness the result, and whenever the patient expired of the bite of the reptile, he was said to have danced himself to death. Such is the origin of the Neapolitan superstition of the tarentula.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
CONTENT AND COURTESY.
The first ambition of mankind is to be happy. To the brute creation, and to man in a state of nature, happiness consists in sensual gratification. To this, succeeds the factitious happiness of civilization; whence the origin of a variety of popular errors and prejudices. From the days of Horace to our own, people have been prone to envy those who pursue any career but their own. But if the soldier envy the position of the civilian, and vice versâ, it is clear that the ambition of being what one is not, arises from the fact that every one is acquainted with the drawback on his own profession, and only appreciates the advantages of that to which he does not belong. La Fontaine never imagined anything more true, or more charming, than the fable of the cobbler entreating the financier to restore him his song and peaceful sleep, in exchange for the hundred crowns he had bestowed upon him. Every one has heard the Persian apologue of the Sophi, to whom, in a fit of acute suffering, the sole remedy prescribed was the shirt of a happy man; a treasure difficult to discover either in Court or city; till at length a ragged wretch was found in the suburbs of Ispahan, who admitted himself to be perfectly happy; but alas! he had not a shirt to his back; and the cure of the Sophi was not more advanced than before.
History has its lessons on this head as well as fiction. The Comte de Ségur relates in his Memoirs, that previous to the Revolution, the Duke de Lauraguais wrote to him as follows:
“Congratulate me, my dear Ségur. Thanks be to Heaven, I am completely ruined! I have nothing left, but am delivered from the importunities of my creditors.”