Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/179

Rh to enjoy the fruits of her victory. The next time she will commence hostilities with a promptness evincing her wrath at the failure of her former attempts. Some five or six successive encounters (though each following discharge of poison may in some degree weaken the effect of the next bite) will thus prove that the supposed magic influence of the serpent's eye is nothing but the after-effect of a not strictly instantaneous poison. The flexible poison-fangs of the serpent do not enable her to hold her prey at the first snap, but she can afford to bide her time, well knowing that the beginning of the end is only a question of a few minutes. During the last of those minutes the victims may behave in a most singular, though under the circumstances no-ways abnormal, manner; and I will agree to sign Jean Bodin's dissertation on the disadvantages of natural explanations, if any thaumaturgist, with a lingering vestige of common sense, should fail to admit the conclusiveness of the experiment.

The serpent-charm delusion is probably nothing but an outcome of the evil-eye superstition, which in mediæval Italy ranked almost as an article of faith. In the same country poison-mongery had then attained the perfection of an exact science. In Naples there were experts who could specify the day when a tincture of Aqua tofana, repeated in a certain number of doses, would overcome the vitality of the toughest constitution. Caesar Borgia could fetch bis man by a mere scratch of a finger-ring. Many of those artists may have studied the subsequent appearance of their victims with a searching look, more apt to attract attention than the furtive administration of the deadly drug. If the victim died, his fate was ascribed to the influence of the mal occhio, a mystic gift which made its possessor an object of dread and envy, but of which the law could not properly take cognizance. The snap-bite, administered perhaps in the tangle of a bramble-bush, has escaped attention; the temporary escape of the victim obliges the serpent to sally from its hiding-place and watch the effect of the dose. At that stage of proceedings the conduct, both of the bird and the snake, is apt to attract the notice of a passer-by, who associates the then visible phenomena—the fixed gaze of the serpent, and the abnormal motions of the bird—thus mistaking a coincident circumstance for the cause of an effect.

Exactly the same mistake has cost the lives of thousands of harmless birds of the family Picidœ. Woodpeckers live upon the larvæ of various species of noxious insects, and haunt dead trees where such insects most abound: hence the extremely prevalent delusion connecting the activity of woodpeckers with the decay of trees. In the language of the backwoodsmen the tree-cleaner has become a tree-destroyer, a "sap-sucker," a name actually applied to the Picus pubescens, or speckled woodpecker, of the North American forests.

In a similar way the beneficent functions of the bat are still repaid with the ingratitude of the chief beneficiary. Bats catch mosquitoes,