an incidental use of the tongue, probably confined, or at all events
most advantageous to the vipers and to other venomous serpents of
lethargic habits. In the case of the extremely active, non-venomous
snake, that glides away into hiding on the slightest alarm, the tongue
would be of little use or no value as a warning organ. Between a snake
of this kind and the slumberous pit-viper the difference in habit is
extreme. But at bottom, all ground snakes are alike in disposition--all
hate to be disturbed, and move only when necessity drives; and we can
imagine that when the tremendous weapon of a lethal tooth had been
acquired, when experience began to teach the larger mammalians to view
the serpentine form with suspicion and to avoid it, the use of the
tongue as a warning would react on the serpent, making it more and more
lethargic in habit--as inactive, in fact, as every snake loves to be.
There is, I imagine, another and more important use of the tongue,
older than its warning use, although this may date back in time to
the Miocene period, when the viperine form existed--a use of the
tongue common to all ophidians that possess the habit of exserting and
vibrating that organ when excited. The subject is somewhat complicated,
for we have not only to consider the tongue, but the whole creature
of which the tongue is so small a part; its singularity and anomalous
position in nature, and the many and diverse ways in which the animals
it preys on are affected by its appearance. Furthermore, I have now
in my mind two separate functions, the first of which occasionally,
perhaps often, passes into and becomes one with the other.
When the common or ring snake pursues a frog, the chase would in most
cases prove a very vain one but for that fatal weakness in the hunted
animal, which quickly brings its superior activity to naught. The snake
need not even be seen for the effect to be produced, as any one can
prove for himself by pushing his walking-stick, snake-wise, through the
grass and causing it to follow up the frog’s motions, whereupon, after
some futile efforts to escape, the creature collapses, and stretching
out its fore-feet like arms that implore mercy, emits a series of
piteous, wailing screams. Thus, all that is necessary for this end to
be reached is that the frog should be conscious of something, no matter
what, pushing after it through the grass. There is here, apart from
the question in animal psychology, a little mystery involved; for how
comes it that in the course of the countless generations during which
the snake has preyed on the frog, this peculiar weakness has not been
eliminated by means of the continual destruction of the individuals
most subject to it, and, on the other hand, the preservation of all
those possessing it in a less degree, or not at all? It is hard for a
good Darwinian to believe that the frog is excessively prolific for
the snake’s advantage rather than for its own. But this question need
not detain us; there are vulnerable spots and weak joints in the
defensive armour of all animals. What I wish to draw attention to is
the fact that, speaking metaphorically, the serpent, of all creatures
that kill their own meat, is the most _unsportsmanlike_ in its methods,
that it has found out and subtly taken advantage of the most secret and
unsuspected weaknesses of the animals on which it preys.
We have seen how the common snake catches the frog; but frogs are found
only in wet places, and snakes abound everywhere, and the sedentary
snake of the dry uplands must feed on the nimble rodent, volatile bird,
and elusive lizard. How does he manage to catch them? For considering
how alert and quick-sighted these small hunted creatures are, it must,
I think, be assumed that the snake cannot, except in rare instances,
approach them unseen and take them unawares. I believe that in many
cases the snake succeeds by approaching its intended victim while
appearing to be stationary. This stratagem is not confined to the
ophidians: in a somewhat different form it is found in a great variety
of animals. Perhaps the most familiar example is afforded by the widely
distributed hunting-spider. The plan followed by this spider, on a
smooth surface where it cannot hide its form, is to advance boldly
towards its prey, and when the fly, who has been suspiciously watching
its approach, is about to dart away, to become motionless. This appears
to excite the fly’s curiosity, and he does not take flight; but very
soon his restive spirit returns, he moves about this way and that,
to see all round him, and each time he turns his bright eyes away the
spider rapidly moves a little nearer; but when the fly looks again,
appears motionless as before. In this way, little by little, the space
is lessened, and yet the fly, still turning at intervals to regard the
suspicious-looking object, does not make his escape, simply because
he does not know that the space has been lessened. Seeing the spider
always motionless the illusion is produced that it has not moved: the
dividing distance has been accurately measured once for all, and no
second act of judgement is required; the fly, knowing his own quickness
and volatile powers, feels himself perfectly safe; and this goes on
until by chance he detects the motion and instantly flies away, or else
fails to detect it and is caught. Cats often succeed in capturing birds
by a similar stratagem.
The snake, unlike the spider and cat, cannot make the final spring and
rush, but must glide up to within striking distance: this he is able
to do by means of the faculty he possesses of progressing so gradually
and evenly as to appear almost motionless; the tongue which he exserts
and rapidly vibrates at intervals when approaching his victim helps in
producing the deception.
Long observation has convinced me that a snake on the ground, moving
or resting, is not a sight that violently excites birds, as they are
excited by the appearance of a fox, cat, weasel, hawk, or any other
creature whose enmity is well known to them. I have frequently seen
little birds running about and feeding on the ground within a few feet
of a snake lying conspicuously in their sight; furthermore, I have
been convinced on such occasions that the birds knew the snake was
there, having observed them raise their heads at intervals, regard
the reptile for a few moments attentively, then go on seeking food.
This shows that birds do sometimes come near snakes and see them with
little or no fear, but probably with some slight suspicion and a great
deal of curiosity, on account of the singularity of their appearance,
their resemblance to vegetable rather than to animal forms of life,
and, above all, to their strange manner of progression. Now the bird,
or lizard, or small mammal, thus brought by chance near to a hungry,
watchful snake, once it begins to regard the snake curiously, is in
imminent danger of destruction in one of two ways, or by a combination
of both: in the first case it may be deluded as to the distance of the
suspicious-looking object and in the end seized, just as the fly is
seized by the salticus spider, before it can make its escape; secondly,
it may, while regarding its singular enemy, be thrown into a trance or
convulsive fit and so rendered powerless to escape, or it may even be
moved to cast itself into the open jaws of the snake. In either case,
the serpent’s tongue would, I believe, play a very important part. In a
case of the first kind the snake would approach its intended victim so
slowly and continuously as almost to appear not to be moving; still, in
most cases the movement probably would be detected but for the tongue,
which attracts the eye by its eccentric motions, its sudden successive
appearances and disappearances; watching the tongue, the long, sinuous
body slowly gliding over the intervening space would not be observed;
only the statuesque raised head and neck would be visible, and these
would appear not to move. The snake’s action in such a case would
resemble the photographer’s trick to make a restive child sit still
while its picture is being taken by directing its attention to some
curious object, or by causing a pocket-handkerchief to flutter above
the camera.
Snakes have been observed to steal upon their victims in this quiet,
subtle manner; the victim, bird or lizard, has been observed to
continue motionless in a watchful attitude, as if ready to dart away,
but still attentively regarding the gradually approaching head and
flickering tongue; and in the end, by a sudden, quick-darting motion
on the part of the snake, the capture has been effected. Cases of this
description are usually set down to “fascination,” which I think is a
mistake.
Fascination is a fine old word, which has done good service and has
had a long day and happily outlived its evil repute: but it had its
faults at the best of times; it originally expressed things purely
human, and therefore did not exactly fit things serpentine, and was,
to some extent, misleading. What its future history--in science--will
be cannot be guessed. In France it has been used to describe a mild
form of hypnotism induced by the contemplation of a bright spot, and
no doubt there would be a certain propriety in applying the word to
the soothing somnolent effect produced on the human subject by the
revolving mirror invented by Dr. Luys. But this is not the form we
are concerned with. Fascination in serpent life is something very
different; in the present state of knowledge on the subject the old
word cannot be discarded. We are now in possession of a very large
number of well-authenticated cases of undoubted fascination in which
the victims are seen to act in a variety of ways, but all alike exhibit
very keen distress. The animal that falls under the spell appears
to be conscious of his loss of power, as in the case of the frog
pursued by the ring-snake. He is thrown into violent convulsions, or
trembles, or screams, or struggles to escape, and sometimes rushes
in terror away only to return again, perhaps in the end to jump into
the serpent’s jaws. A brother of mine once observed a pipit running
with flutterings round and round a coiled snake, uttering distressed
chirps and cries; the snake, vibrating its tongue, moved its head round
to follow the motions of the bird. This is a common form--the desire
and vain striving to escape. But when an animal is seen to remain
motionless, showing no signs of distress or fear, attentively regarding
the gradually approaching snake, such a case cannot, I think, be
safely set down to fascination, nor to anything more out of the common
than curiosity, and, as in the case of the volatile, sprightly fly and
terrestrial spider, to the illusion produced in the victim’s mind that
the suspicious-looking object is stationary.
Concerning the use, here suggested, of the tongue in fascination,
I can scarcely expect that those whose knowledge of the snake is
derived from books, from specimens in museums, and from seeing the
animal alive in confinement, will regard it as anything more than an
improbable supposition, unsupported by facts. But to those who have
attentively observed the creature in a state of nature, and have been
drawn to it by, and wondered at, its strangeness, the explanation, I
venture to think, will not seem improbable. To weigh, count, measure,
and dissect for purposes of identification, classification, and what
not, and to search in bones and tissues for hidden affinities, it is
necessary to see closely; but this close seeing would be out of place
and a hindrance in other lines of inquiry. To know the creature,
undivested of life or liberty or of anything belonging to it, it must
be seen with an atmosphere, in the midst of the nature in which it
harmoniously moves and has its being, and the image it casts on the
observer’s retina and mind must be identical with its image in the eye
and mind of the other wild creatures that share the earth with it. It
is not here maintained that the tongue is everything, nor that it is
the principal agent in fascination, but only that it is a necessary
part of the creature, and of the creature’s strangeness, which is able
to produce so great and wonderful an effect. The long, limbless body,
lithely and mysteriously gliding on the surface; the glittering scales
and curious mottlings, bright or lurid; the statuesque, arrowy head,
sharp-cut and immovable; the round lidless eyes, fixed and brilliant;
and the long, bifurcated tongue, shining black or crimson, with its
fantastic flickering play before the close-shut, lipless mouth--that is
the serpent, and probably no single detail in the fateful creature’s
appearance could be omitted and the effect of its presence on other
animals be the same.
* * * * *
When, years ago, I had finished writing the above paper, which appeared
later in the _Fortnightly Review_, I made the following entry in my
Diary, and reproduce it here just to show that I am not apt to set too
high a value on my own theory.
“This paper was not too long, but I’m glad it’s finished and done
with. Not because the subject didn’t interest me--on the contrary, it
had a tremendous attraction for me--but because, having written it, a
difficulty has been removed, a pain relieved, a want satisfied. True,
that I’ve only imagined this use for a serpent’s tongue, and that it
may not be the true use--if any use there be; but if we have a need
to build, and there is any wind or cloud to build on, ’tis best to go
on bravely with the building business. Who cares if the structure is
all to tumble down again? Not I. Nevertheless the mere building is a
pleasure, and the completion of the structure a satisfaction in that
it puts something where before there was nothing. The speculative
soul which is in man abhors the desert, vacant spaces and waters and
islands of nothingness. Thus, to illustrate this little thing by a big
thing--the little flickering tongue of the serpent by something so big
that it fills the entire universe--the existence of an ethereal medium
is possibly no more than a figment of the mind, an invention to get us
out of a difficulty, or a ‘purely hypothetical supposition,’ as was
boldly said by one of our greatest physicists. At all events, a lady
lean and pale who came at our call, tottering forth wrapped in a gauzy
veil--surely the most attenuated and shadowy of all the daughters of
Old Father Speculation. But having got her in our arms, thin and pale
though she be, we imagine her beautiful and love her dearly, and rest
satisfied with the breasts of her consolations, albeit they are of no
more substance than thistle-down.”
XV
THE SERPENT’S STRANGENESS
The following passages from the _Queen of the Air_, which refer to
the serpent myth and the serpent’s strange appearance and manner of
progression, have, apart from their exceeding beauty, a very special
bearing on the subject of this paper. And in quoting them I am
only following Ruskin’s own plan, when, in his lectures on Natural
History at Oxford, he considered in each case, first, what had been
“beautifully thought about the creature.” It would be hard, I imagine,
to find a passage of greater beauty on this subject than Ruskin’s own,
unless it be that famous fragment concerning the divine nature of the
serpent and the serpent tribe from Sanchoniathan the Phoenician, who
flourished some thirty centuries ago. It is true that among the learned
some hold that he never flourished at all, nor existed; but doctors
disagree on that point; and, in any case, the fragment exists, and was
most certainly written by some one.
Ruskin writes:
Next, in the serpent we approach the source of a group of myths,
world-wide, founded on great and common human instincts.... There
are such things as natural myths ... the dark sayings of men may be
difficult to read, and not always worth reading; but the dark sayings
of nature will probably become clearer for the looking into, and will
very certainly be worth reading. And, indeed, all guidance to the
right sense of the human and variable myths will probably depend on
our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable ones....
Is there indeed no tongue, except the mute forked flash from its lips,
in that running brook of horror on the ground? Why that horror? We all
feel it, yet how imaginative it is, how disproportioned to the real
strength of the creature!... But that horror is of the myth, not of
the creature; ... it is the strength of the base element that is so
dreadful in the serpent; it is the omnipotence of the earth.... It is
a divine hieroglyph of the demoniac power of the earth, of the entire
earthly nature.
Of the animal’s motions he says:
That rivulet of smooth silver--how does it flow, think you? It
literally rows on the earth, with every scale for an oar; it bites
the dust with the ridges of its body. Watch it when it moves slowly;
a wave, but without wind! a current, but with no fall! all the body
moving at the same instant, yet some of it to one side, some to
another, and some forward, and the rest of the coil backwards; but all
with the same calm will and equal way--no contraction, no extension;
one soundless, causeless march of sequent rings, a spectral procession
of spotted dust, with dissolution in its fangs, dislocation in its
coils. Startle it: the winding stream will become a twisted arrow; the
wave of poisoned life will lash through the grass like a cast lance.
He adds: “I cannot understand this forward motion of the snake,” which
is not strange, seeing that Solomon, the wise man, found in “the way of
a serpent upon a rock” one of the three wonderful things that baffled
his intellect. And before Solomon, the old Phoenician wrote that
Taautus esteemed the serpent as the most inspired of all the reptiles,
and of a fiery nature, inasmuch as it exhibits an incredible celerity,
moving by its spirit without either hands or feet. Thanks to modern
anatomists, this thing is no longer a puzzle to us; but with the mere
mechanical question we are not concerned in this place, but only with
the sense of wonder and mystery produced in the mind by the apparently
“causeless march of sequent rings.”
From English Coniston, where snakes are few and diminutive, let us go
to the pine forest of the new world, where dwells the famous _Pituophis
melanoleucus_, the serpent of the pines. This is the largest, most
active and beautiful of the North American ophidians, attaining a
length of ten to twelve feet, and arrayed in a “bright coat of soft
creamy-white, upon which are laid, much in the Dolly Varden mode,
shining blotches or mottlings, which beginning at the neck are of
an intensely dark brown or chocolate colour, but which towards the
tail lighten into a pale chestnut.” A local Ruskin, the Rev. Samuel
Lockwood, a lover of snakes, kept some of these reptiles in his house,
and referring to their wonderful muscular feats, he writes as follows:
Owing to this command of the muscles the pine snake is capable of
performing some evolutions which are not only beautiful, but so
intricate and delicate as to make them seem imbued with the nature we
call spiritual. I have often seen the Pituophis, spread out in loose
coils with its head in the central one, wake up after a long repose
and begin a movement in every curve, the entire body engaged in the
mazy movements, with no going out or deviation from the complicated
pattern marked on the floor. Observing this intricate harmoniousness
of movement, I thought of the seer’s vision of mystic wheels. Those
revolving coils--“and their appearance and their work was as it were
a wheel in the middle of a wheel.”... The movements of a serpent are
never started, rope-like, at one end, and then transmitted to the
other; nor is the movement like the force-waves sent through a ribbon
vibrating in the air. The movement consists of numberless units of
individual activities, all regulated by and under control of one
individual will that is felt in every curve and line. There is some
likeness to the thousand personal activities of a regiment seen on
their winding way. And all this perfection of control of so many
complicated activities is true, whether the serpent, like an ogre, be
crushing its victim’s bones, or, as a limbless posturist, be going
through its inimitable evolutions. In our thinking a serpent ranks
as a paradox among animals. There is so much seeming contradiction.
At one time encircling its prey as in iron bands; again assuming
the immovable posturing of a statue; then melting into movements
so intricate and delicate that the lithe limbless thing looks like
gossamer incarnate. In this creature all the unities seem to be set
aside. Such weakness and such strength; such gentleness and such
vindictiveness; so much of beauty and yet so repulsive; fascination
and terror: what need to wonder that, whether snake or python, the
serpent should so figure in the myths of all ages and the literature
of the whole world! Yes, in the best and worst thinkings of man!
In the literature of the whole world, true; but let no one run away
with the idea that gems of this kind are to be picked up anywhere, and
go out to seek for them, since for every one equalling these in lustre
he will burden himself with many a bushel of common pebbles.
Lockwood called to mind the mystic wheels in Ezekiel’s splendid
imaginings--“for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”
His lissom beautiful captive might also have been likened to Shelley’s
dream-serpent in the _Witch of Atlas_--
In the flame
Of its own volumes intervolved.
He had abundant reason to admire the creature’s intricate and delicate
movements when it appeared like “gossamer incarnate,” after having
witnessed its motions of another kind, and its deadly power. He had
seen it lying extended, apparently asleep, on the floor of its box,
when a rat, which had been placed with it, ran over it, but not quite
over it, for, quick as lightning, it had wound itself round the rat’s
body, coil over coil, like hand grasping hand in squeezing a lemon,
until the bones of the constricted animal cracked audibly; then it was
dropped, dead and crushed and limp, on to the floor; and the serpent,
having revenged the indignity, resumed its interrupted repose. With
this lightning-like deadly quickness of motion and the melting mazy
evolutions at the other times, he also contrasted its statue-like
immobility, when, with head raised high and projecting forwards, it
would actually remain for hours at a stretch, its brilliant eyes fixed
on some object that had alarmed it or excited its curiosity.
This power of continuing motionless, with the lifted head projecting
forwards, for an indefinite time, is one of the most wonderful of
the serpent’s muscular feats, and is of the highest importance to
the animal both when fascinating its victim and when mimicking some
inanimate object, as, for instance, the stem and bud of an aquatic
plant; here it is only referred to on account of the effect it produces
on the human mind, as enhancing the serpent’s strangeness. In this
attitude, with the round, unwinking eyes fixed on the beholder’s
face, the effect may be very curious and uncanny. Ernest Glanville, a
South African writer, thus describes his own experience. When a boy
he frequently went out into the bush in quest of game, and on one of
these solitary excursions he sat down to rest in the shade of a willow
on the bank of a shallow stream; sitting there, with cheek resting on
his hand, he fell into a boyish reverie. After some time he became
aware in a vague way that on the white sandy bottom of the stream there
was stretched a long black line which had not been there at first. He
continued for some time regarding it without recognising what it was;
but all at once, with an inward shock, became fully conscious that he
was looking at a large snake.
Presently, without apparent motion, so softly and silently was it
done, the snake reared its head above the surface and held it there,
erect and still, with gleaming eyes fixed on me in question of what
I was. It flashed upon me then that it would be a good opportunity
to test the power of the human eye on a snake, and I set myself the
task of looking it down. It was a foolish effort. The bronze head and
sinewy neck, about which the water flowed without a ripple, were as if
carved in stone, and the cruel unwinking eyes, with the light coming
and going in them, appeared to glow the brighter the longer I looked.
Gradually there came over me a sensation of sickening fear, which, if
I had yielded to it, would have left me powerless to move; but with
a cry I leapt up, and, seizing a fallen willow branch, attacked the
reptile with a species of fury.... Probably the idea of the Icanti
originated in a similar experience of some native.