Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/107

Rh throw light on this riddle thus left unsolved, and yet so evidently full of significance. In the accompanying figure I have compared Schick's drawing of the mystical serpent of Palestine with the great White Horse. This inestimable relic of British times and piety, at Uffington, will be, perhaps, noticed primâ facie to have some characters in common with these hybrid serpents.

Let the reader carefully notice the following features, and see if they do not justify an inference as curious and memorable—and in its consequences as important and as large—as we are often in a position to draw. For:—

1. Each has, apparently, a bird's head. 2. Yet each has the semblance of a horse's; or, if the upper one has not decidedly, it is plainly a horse itself. 3. Each, for body, has one very long thin sweep. 4. And this expressed in two continuous curves, and no more.

It may be added that in both forms not only are the curves beautifully designed—which, in the case of the White Horse, on the steep hillside in vast dimensions, is truly wonderful—but in every part of the figure the curves are admirable and almost perfect, however rude may be the shape. Let them be minutely observed.

On the serpent are excrescences not found in nature, two, with knobs on the ends; these might seem to answer, occultly, to the double dividing to form the horse's limbs. And the great thinness of the latter's body and neck—making them hardly wider than the tail with which they are drawn so continuous—is now explicable. For thus it makes the beast a serpent with legs; nay, the imperfection of these last may be thus explained, perhaps, too. It is, certainly, to be thought that the ancient Britons could have drawn the width of a horse's body in better