Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/625

 mischief of anti-natural dogmas could be estimated by their direct effects—the propagation of a greater or smaller number of preposterous tenets; the chief bane of their influence is indirect and subjective, rather than objective. Not external facts only, but our own vision, they have obscured; the victims of supernaturalism have lost their critical faculty as well as their critical conscience—their standard of probability itself has been falsified. Like an all-pervading mist, the poison-vapor of mysticism has obscured the light of science, and blinded the eye of common sense to innumerable fallacies and charlatanries. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus is the patron-saint of all quacks—of mesmerists, fasting girls, blue glass and patent-medicine peddlers—as well as of indulgence-brokers. Mere dogma-worship might imply connivance, rather than blindness a sort of noli-me-tangére awe more than insensibility; but also in scientific theorems where free inquiry is not only permitted but specially invited, the most obvious and palpable nonsense fails to be seen and felt. For people who have been fuddled with mysticism lose their relish for simple truth; the old credo quod absurdum videtur ("since it appears preposterous, I believe it") seems to be their motto.

A very characteristic instance of this abject credulity is the serpent-charm superstition. Millions of our countrymen still believe in what they call snake-charming; i. e., the ability of certain reptiles to paralyze smaller animals by the magic power of their eyes, a belief whose tenacity and extravagant absurdity nearly justify Pierre Gassendi's complaint that in regard to all occult phenomena the most supernatural theory is sure to become the popular one. Blacksnakes overtake their prey by superior swiftness and strangle them by superior strength; but the fact that such sluggish creatures as the Indian cobra and the American rattlesnake are able to capture birds and squirrels seemed to demand an abnormal explanation, and the demand, as usual, was equaled by the supply. Truth-loving and otherwise intelligent persons listen gravely to stories about linnets who hopped from branch to branch into the penetralia of a snake-infested bush, or swallows who paused in their headlong flight, hovered with tremulous wings for a minute or two, and then descended in a reluctant flutter toward a ditch or hedge where the enemy lay concealed, a coiled snake with a pair of twinkling optics that glittered like demons' eyes, while the doomed bird came nearer and nearer, and finally saved the serpent the trouble of swallowing it by hopping down its throat. The natives of our Southern coast States ascribe the same faculty to lizards and toads; and the darkeys of the Georgia river plantations, if asked to account for the frequent disappearance of sucking pigs, used to explain that they had been charmed away by alligators, who, without leaving their native element, were able to draw a pig clear across a ten-acre field by cocking their eyes in a peculiar way! But the arch-conjurer of our continent is still the sneaking rattlesnake, whose power for mischief is