THE SERPENT OF THE BIBLE. PROFESSOR OWEN, the distinguished English naturalist, in his work on British reptiles, makes the following remarks on the serpent of the Bible:The discovery of serpents of different genera and species, all manifesting the peculiar and characteristic vertebral organisation of true Ophidia, at a period incalculably remote from that at which we have any evidence of the existence of man-viz., the eocene tertiary-forcibly recalls our early ideas of the nature and origin of serpents, derived from annotations of Scripture, which represented them as the progeny of a transmuted species, degraded from its originally created form as the consequence and punishment of its instrumentality in the temptation of Eve. "The curse upon the serpent," say the learned Drs D'Oily and Mant, "consisted, 1st, in bringing down his stature, which was probably in a great measure erect before this time-' Upon thy belly shalt thou go;' 2dly, in the meanness of his provision-'and dust shalt thou eat;' insomuch as, creeping upon the ground, it cannot but lick up much dust with its food." The idea of the special degradation of the serpent to its actual form, derived from interpreting the sentence upon it as a literal statement of fact, has been so prevalent, as to have affected some of the zoological treatises of the last century. Thus, in a "Natural History of Serpents," by Charles Owen, D.D., published in 1742, the author, treating of the food of these reptiles, writes, "That dust was not the original food of the serpent, seems evident from the Paradisaic serpent, but the necessary consequence of the change made in the manner of its motion; i. e. the prone posture of its body, by which it is doomed to live upon food intermixed with earth." Adam Clark, commenting more recently upon the record in its literal sense, seeks to elude the difficulties which thence arise, by contending that the Hebrew "nachash" may be translated "ape," as well as "serpent." But we find him reduced to the necessity of glossing the text by such expositions, as that to go on the belly means on "all fours;" and by affirming, of the arboreal frugiverous four-handed monkeys, that "they are obliged to gather their food from the ground," we have a lively instance of the straits to which the commentator is reduced who attempts to penetrate deeper than the Word warrants into the nature of that mysterious beginning of crime and punishment, by the dim light of an imperfect and second-hand knowledge of the divine works. If, indeed, the laws of animated nature formed part of the preliminary studies of the theologist, the futility of such attempts to expound the third chapter of Genesis, viewed as a simple narration of facts, would be better appreciated by him; and, if he should still be prompted to append his thoughts, as so many lamps by the side of the sacred text, he would most probably restrict himself to the attempt to elucidate its symbolical signification. What geology and anatomy have unfolded of the nature of serpents, in regard to their present condition, amounts to this: that their parts are as exquisitely adjusted to the form of the whole, and to their habits and sphere of life, as is the organisation of any animal which we call superior to them. It is true the serpent has no limbs, yet it can outclimb the monkey, outswim the fish, outleap the jerboa, and, suddenly loosing the close coils of its crouching spiral, it can spring into the air and seize the bird upon the wing: thus all these creatures fall its prey. The serpent has neither hands nor talons, yet it can outwrestle the athlete, and crush the tiger in its folds. Far from licking up its food as it glides along, the serpent lifts up its crushed prey, and presents it, grasped in the death coil as in the hand, to the gaping slime-dropping mouth. It is truly wonderful to see the work of hands, feet, fins, performed by a simple modification of the vertebral column in a multiplication of its joints, with mobility of its ribs. As serpents move chiefly on the surface of the earth, their danger is greatest from pressure or blows from above; all the joints are accordingly fashioned to resist yielding, and to sustain pressure in a vertical direction; there is no natural undulation of the body upwards and downwards, it is permitted only from side to side. So closely and compactly do the ten pairs of joints between each side of the two or three hundred vertebræ fit together, that even in a relaxed and dead state the body cannot be twisted, except in a series of side coils. Of this the reader may assure himself by an experiment on a dead and supple snake. Let him lay it straight along a level surface; seize the end of the tail, and, by a movement of rotation between the thumb and finger, endeavour to screw the snake into spiral coils; before he can produce a single turn, the whole of the long and slender body will roll over as rigidly as if it were a stick. When we call to mind the anatomical structure of the skull, the singular density and structure of the bones of the cranium strike us as a special provision against fracture and injury to the head. When we contemplate the remarkable manner in which all the bones of the skull overlap one another, we cannot but discern a special adaptation in the structure of serpents to their commonly prone position, and a provision for the dangers to which they were subject from falling bodies and the tread of heavy beasts. But the whole organisation of the serpent is replete with many other such beautiful instances of foresight and design. What, however, more particularly concerns us in the relation of the serpent to our history, is the great and significant fact revealed by palæontology; viz., that all these peculiarities and complexities of organisation, in designed subserviency to a prone posture and a gliding progress upon the belly, were given by a beneficent Creator to the serpents of that early tertiary period of our planet's history, when, in the slow and progressive preparation of the earth, the species which are now our contemporaries were just begin |