e. It is after this mode the fisherman kills
the salmon captured in his wear, and a single blow, when well directed,
is always sufficient; but no single blow has the same effect on the
earthworm; and here it was vitality in the inferior portion of the
reptile,--the earthworm portion of it, if I may so speak,--that refused
to participate in the state of syncope into which the vitality of the
superior portion had been thrown. The nice and delicate vitality of the
brain seems to impart to the whole system in connection with it an
aptitude for dying suddenly,--a susceptibility of instant death, which
would be wanting without it. The heart of the rabbit continues to beat
regularly long after the brain has been removed by careful excision, if
respiration be artificially kept up; but if, instead of amputating the
head, the brain be crushed in its place by a sudden blow of a hammer,
the heart ceases its motion at once. And such seemed to be the principle
illustrated here. But why the agonized dancing on the sward of the
inferior part of the reptile?--why its after painful writhing and
wriggling? The young eel scooped from the stream, whose motions it
resembled, is impressed by terror, and can feel pain; was _it_ also
impressed by terror, or susceptible of suffering? We see in the case of
both exactly the same signs,--the dancing, the writhing, the wriggling;
but are we to interpret them after the same manner? In the small
red-headed earthworm divided by Spalanzani, that in three months got
upper extremities to its lower part, and lower extremities, in as many
weeks, to its upper part, the dividing blow must have dealt duplicate
feelings,--pain and terror to the portion below, and pain and terror to
the portion above,--so far, at least, as a creature so low in the scale
was susceptible of these feelings; but are we to hold that the leaping,
wriggling tail of the reptile possessed in any degree a similar
susceptibility? _I_ can propound the riddle, but who shall resolve it?
It may be added, that this brown lizard was the only recent saurian I
chanced to see in the Hebrides, and that, though large for its kind, its
whole bulk did not nearly equal that of a single vertebral joint of the
fossil saurians of Eigg. The reptile, since his deposition from the
first place in the scale of creation, has sunk sadly in those parts: the
ex-monarch has become a low plebeian.

We came down upon the coast through a swampy valley, terminating in th