Читать книгу Those Other Animals - G. A. Henty - Страница 10

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IN treating of the snake it should at once be premised that all accounts of it must be received with a certain amount of suspicion, as representing the views of man as to the snake, rather than the real state of things. It is notorious that no historian, however much he may strive to write without bias, can be thoroughly trusted in his account of matters in which he is a partisan of one side or another. Upon no subject is man more strongly prejudiced than upon that of the snake; and although he may endeavour to do it justice, it is impossible that he should succeed, writing as he does under the influence of a hereditary enmity against it. The transaction in the Garden of Eden is doubtless responsible for much of this feeling among Western peoples; but this would have no influence with Orientals and others who are still in ignorance of the legend, and the feeling must therefore be considered as a natural and instinctive antipathy throughout the whole human race. Whether such a feeling would ever have existed had not a considerable proportion of snakes been provided with poison fangs, is a point that can never be determined with precision; but the probabilities are certainly strongly in favour of the theory that it is entirely to its lethal powers that the snake owes the distrust and hostility of man. In itself there is nothing that is or should be objectionable in its appearance. Very many species are beautifully marked; their movements are for the most part graceful; and they are admirably adapted in all respects for the life they have to lead. The harmless sorts have frequently been tamed, and are capable of considerable affection for their masters; and even the poisonous kinds, when deprived of their fangs and accustomed to the presence of man, have no objection to be handled, and submit to familiarities without any show of resentment. Unfortunately for the snake, man is not endowed with an instinct that enables him at once to distinguish between the harmless and venomous species, and the consequence is, that in the countries where snakes abound, one of the first things impressed upon the minds of little children by their mothers is, that the snake is a creature to be severely let alone; and even in a country like our own, where poisonous snakes are rare, we are never able in after life to completely emancipate ourselves from the prejudices of childhood. The snake, upon the other hand, has no natural hostility to man. If man places his foot upon its tail it will of course retaliate, but with a few exceptions the snake never goes out of its way to attack man, and will always avoid a contest if the opportunity be afforded to it. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that if man were inclined to be on good terms with it, the feeling would be more than reciprocated. The snake suffers much from cold, and would gladly accept the genial warmth of the human bed, or the human dwelling, were it but made welcome. Even as it is, it does sometimes seek that warmth, with consequences that are frequently unpleasant either to man or itself.

As man has at all times been in the habit of deifying creatures of which he is afraid, it is not surprising that snake worship has existed to a very considerable extent among most of the primitive peoples of the world in localities where the snake is a good deal in evidence, and even among the moderns it is intimately associated with the author of all evil. Among the almost infinite number of legends that surround the snake, and testify to the deep respect in which it has always been held, is that to the effect that earthquakes are due to the movements of a gigantic serpent immured deep down in the centre of the world. Had the snake been gifted with the ordinary powers of locomotion, it is probable that he would have excited a smaller amount of disfavour, but man is given to dislike anything that he does not understand, and the mysterious and silent movements of the snake were to him so unaccountable as to excite antipathy. It is remarkable, however, that the worm, whose mode of progression is somewhat similar, has escaped the same odium. The eye of the snake has unquestionably operated to his prejudice; there is an entire want of expression about it which baffles the effort of man to penetrate its mask, and to get at the creature’s inner nature. Had the snake been endowed with an eyelid and a clear liquid eye, man would have been more inclined to respond to its advances, and to give it the place it requires by his domestic hearth. It is doubtless unjust that the snake should suffer from a defect for which it is not personally responsible, but unfortunately man is not always just in his dealings with the lower order of creation.

The snake varies in dimensions far more than does any other living creature. The dog perhaps approaches most nearly to it in this respect, but the dog is to a great extent what man has made him by careful breeding and selection; and yet even in that case the great St. Bernard is not so large in proportion to the tiny toy terrier as is the giant boa of tropical forests by the side of some of the slender little whip snakes. Undoubtedly the snake in prehistoric times grew to much larger dimensions than at present, and skeletons of snakes have been found in America by the side of which the largest existing python is absolutely insignificant. Indeed, they rival in size the largest sea-serpent, as described by its beholders. The serpent that kept a whole Roman army at bay was but a pigmy to these extinct creatures, and man has reason to congratulate himself that they probably disappeared before he had any opportunity of coming into contact with them.

No theory has been offered by men of science why some species of snakes should be provided with venomous fangs, while others have no such advantage, and there have been hot arguments whether the original father of all snakes was or was not so furnished. The balance of probability would certainly appear to be with those who argue that he must have had venomous teeth. Had it not been so, it is difficult to believe that his descendants could by any process of survival or selection have established poison bags in their jaws, with the necessary apparatus for passing that poison through hollows in the fangs. Upon the other hand, it is easy to understand that had the snakes all been originally so furnished, some of them might, either from accident or from incautiously grasping a round stone under the belief that it was a bird’s egg, have knocked out their fangs, and that their descendants might have been born without them. We have, indeed, an example of similar action in the case of the Manx cat, who, being descended from an ancestor which had, either by traps or otherwise, the misfortune to lose his tail, begot a race of tail-less cats, whose descendants have to the present day lacked the usual caudal appendage. If, then, a cat could transmit this accidental peculiarity to his descendants, there can be no reason to doubt that, in some cases, a snake having lost his poison fangs could be the father of a race of snakes similarly deficient.

As might be expected, the largest snakes all belong to the non-venomous species. Being unprovided with the teeth that enabled their congeners to slay their prey or combat enemies, the fangless snakes would naturally devise other means to procure a living. Having no offensive weapons, they would recognise at once that some entirely novel means must be hit upon. They could neither bite nor tear their prey: they could neither stun it with blows, nor, like the crocodile, drown it. It was, we may suppose, to a snake of exceptional genius that the idea occurred of squeezing a foe to death. The idea was, doubtless, received with enthusiasm, but to be carried into effect against any but the smallest of creatures it was clearly necessary that the fangless snakes should attain far larger dimensions than those possessed by any of the species furnished with poison fangs. However, the idea once mooted, Mr. Darwin’s system of natural selection would do the rest. The smaller individuals remained small, and from them sprang the blind worm and other species of harmless snakes. The larger individuals paired together, and keeping the one object steadily before them, in time their descendants attained the gigantic proportions of the fossil serpents, who could have mastered and made a meal of the Mastodon as easily as the largest boa now existing could dispose of a rabbit. With the disappearance of the huge prehistoric animals, the serpent must have seen that unless he were to perish of hunger it was necessary for him to reduce his size; and by a long process, the exact reverse of that by which he had built up his bulk, he diminished himself to dimensions which, though still vastly greater than those of the poisonous snake, were yet in exact proportion to the size of the animals that were henceforth to furnish him with food.

So far there has been no marked change in the sentiments which man and the snake have entertained towards each other from the earliest times; and it is probable that at no distant date, when man has peopled the world to its utmost limits, the snake will find that it is incumbent upon him to go.