this statement, however, to be an exaggeration. I was assured that
this was not the case in St. Lucia; that the snake attacks no
oftener than other venomous snakes,--that is, when trodden on, or
when his retreat is cut off. At all events, it seems easy enough to
kill him: so easy, that I hope yet it may be possible to catch him
alive, and that the Zoological Gardens may at last possess--what
they have long coveted in vain--hideous attraction of a live Fer-de-
lance. The specimens which we brought home are curious enough, even
from this aesthetic point of view. Why are these poisonous snakes
so repulsive in appearance, some of them at least, and that not in
proportion to their dangerous properties? For no one who puts the
mere dread out of his mind will call the Cobras ugly, even anything
but beautiful; nor, again, the deadly Coral snake of Trinidad, whose
beauty tempts children, and even grown people, to play with it, or
make a necklace of it, sometimes to their own destruction. But who
will call the Puff Adder of the Cape, or this very Fer-de-lance,
anything but ugly and horrible: not only from the brutality
signified, to us at least, by the flat triangular head and the heavy
jaw, but by the look of malevolence and craft signified, to us at
least, by the eye and the lip? 'To us at least,' I say. For it is
an open question, and will be one, as long as the nominalist and the
realist schools of thought keep up their controversy--which they
will do to the world's end--whether this seeming hideousness be a
real fact: whether we do not attribute to the snake the same
passions which we should expect to find--and to abhor--in a human
countenance of somewhat the same shape, and then justify our
assumption to ourselves by the creature's bites, which are actually
no more the result of craft and malevolence than the bite of a
frightened mouse or squirrel. I should be glad to believe that the
latter theory were the true one; that nothing is created really