d authority that "almost every
animal becomes panic-struck at the sight of the rattlesnake, and seems at
once deprived of the power of motion, or the exercise of its usual
instinct of self-preservation." Other serpents seem to share this power
of fascination, as the Cobra and the Buccephalus Capensis.

Some think that it is nothing but fright; others attribute it to the

"strange powers that lie
Within the magic circle of the eye,"--

as Churchill said, speaking of Garrick.

You ask me about those mysterious and frightful intimacies between
children and serpents, of which so many instances have been recorded. I
am sure I cannot tell what to make of them. I have seen several such
accounts in recent papers, but here is one published in the seventeenth
century, which is as striking as any of the more modern ones:

"Mr. Herbert Tones of Monmouth, when he was a little Boy, was used to eat
his Milk in a Garden in the Morning, and was no sooner there, but a large
Snake always came, and eat out of the Dish with him, and did so for a
considerable time, till one Morning, he striking the Snake on the Head,
it hissed at him. Upon which he told his Mother that the Baby (for so he
call'd it) cry'd Hiss at him. His Mother had it kill'd, which occasioned
him a great Fit of Sickness, and 'twas thought would have dy'd, but did
recover."

There was likewise one "William Writtle, condemned at Maidston Assizes
for a double murder, told a Minister that was with him after he was
condemned, that his mother told him, that when he was a Child, there
crept always to him a Snake, wherever she laid him. Sometimes she would
convey him up Stairs, and leave him never so little, she should be sure
to find a Snake in the Cradle with him, but never perceived it did him
any harm."

One of the most striking alleged facts connected with the mysterious
relation existing between the serpent and-the human species is the
influence which the poison of the Crotulus, taken internally, seemed to
produce over the moral faculties, in the experiments instituted by Dr.
Hering at Surinam. There is something frightful in the disposition of
certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at the eyes of cattle
without any apparent provocation or other motive. It is natural enough
that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a
serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being
like cow-pox b