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This is he that lashes the poor author the next day in the newspapers. "The Deaf Adder, or Surda Echidna of Linnaeus. These Adders refuse to hear the voice of the charmer, because the tuning of his instrument gave them offence. "I should weary you, and myself too, if I were to go through all the classes of the serpent kind. Two qualities are common to them all.
But, in passing through his mind, that of a New Englander conscious of New England's past, science takes a stain of romance and superstition. Elsie Venner, through an experience of her mother's, inherits the nature of the serpent, so the novel is as far from common life as the tale of "Melusine," or any other echidna.
The long tubular nose of the echidna is the vital spot. This is guarded with such shrewdness and determination as to be impregnable. But the dog which pursues the proper tactics, and is wily and patient, sooner or later-regardless of the alleged poisonous spur seizes one of the hind legs, and the conflict quickly comes to an end.
It dwells upon the banks of rivers, lakes, or marshes, burrows in the ground like a badger, swims and dives well, and feeds chiefly on aquatic insects. The echidna is altogether a different sort of creature, both in appearance and habits. It is, in reality, an ant-eater, with the body of a porcupine, having a long slender snout and an extensile tongue, just like that of other ant-eaters.
Those who partook of the last of the wallabies have gone the way of all flesh, and the incident is instructive only as an illustration of the manner in which animals may suddenly disappear from confined localities, leaving no relic of previous existence. Though the drawings in caves depict lizards, echidna, turtle and men, there is no representation of kangaroo or wallaby.
Breaks often occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridae between the elephant, and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and all other mammals.
Think, my friends, of a continent, the margin of which, instead of the center, rose out of the waves originally like a gigantic ring, which encloses, perhaps, in its center, a sea partly evaporated, the waves of which are drying up daily; where humidity does not exist either in the air or in the soil; where the trees lose their bark every year, instead of their leaves; where the leaves present their sides to the sun and not their face, and consequently give no shade; where the wood is often incombustible, where good-sized stones are dissolved by the rain; where the forests are low and the grasses gigantic; where the animals are strange; where quadrupeds have beaks, like the echidna, or ornithorhynchus, and naturalists have been obliged to create a special order for them, called monotremes; where the kangaroos leap on unequal legs, and sheep have pigs' heads; where foxes fly about from tree to tree; where the swans are black; where rats make nests; where the bower-bird opens her reception-rooms to receive visits from her feathered friends; where the birds astonish the imagination by the variety of their notes and their aptness; where one bird serves for a clock, and another makes a sound like a postilion cracking of a whip, and a third imitates a knife-grinder, and a fourth the motion of a pendulum; where one laughs when the sun rises, and another cries when the sun sets!
The ordinary Australian pouched mammals belong to far less ancient types than ornithorhynchus and echidna, but they too are very old in structure, though they have undergone an extraordinary separate evolution to fit them for the most diverse positions in life.
The supernatural origin of the Scythian nation, from the union of Hercules and the monstrous Echidna, is set aside by him for the more probable account that they were a nomad tribe driven by the Massagetae from Asia; and he appeals to the local names of their country as proof of the fact that the Kimmerians were the original possessors.
"An huge great beast it was, when it in length Was stretchèd forth, that nigh filled all the place, And seemed to be of infinite great strength; Horrible, hideous, and of hellish race, Borne of the brooding of Echidna base, Or other like infernall Furies kinde, For of a maide she had the outward face To hide the horrour which did lurke behinde The better to beguile whom she so fond did finde.
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