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Updated: June 10, 2025
If the less perfect ophidians, or snakes, which now abound on the earth had taken the lead in those ancient days among the land reptiles, and the Deinosaurians had been contemporary with Man, there can be no doubt that the progressionist would have seized upon this fact with unfeigned satisfaction as confirmatory of his views.
There is something frightful in the disposition of certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at the eyes of cattle without any apparent provocation or other motive. It is natural enough that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being like cow-pox by vaccination.
I refer to a habit of some ophidians, in temperate and cold countries, of returning annually to hybernate in the saine den. A typical instance is that of the rattlesnake in the colder parts of North America.
I have, on more than one occasion, seen a contest between, them and one of the viscous ophidians, Cæcilia, glutinosa , a reptile resembling an enormous earthworm, common in the Kandyan hills, of an inch in diameter, and nearly two feet in length.
In ruder lands, where ophidians abound, as in India and South America, in the dark one fears the cold living coil and deadly sudden fang.
They never winked, for ophidians have no movable eyelids, but kept up an awful fixed stare. Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold, still light.
There is something frightful in the disposition of certain ophidians, as the whipsnake, which darts at the eyes of cattle without any apparent provocation or other motive. It is natural enough that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being like cow-pox by vaccination.
There is something frightful in the disposition of certain ophidians, as the whip-snake, which darts at the eyes of cattle without any apparent provocation or other motive. It is natural enough that the evil principle should have been represented in the form of a serpent, but it is strange to think of introducing it into a human being like cow-pox by vaccination.
Yet, strangely enough, many persons missed the excitement of the possibility of a fatal bite in other regions, where there were nothing but black and green and striped snakes, mean ophidians, having the spite of the nobler serpent without his venom, poor crawling creatures, whom Nature would not trust with a poison-bag.
They never winked, for ophidians have no movable eyelids, but kept up that awful fixed stare which made the two unwinking gladiators the survivors of twenty pairs matched by one of the Roman Emperors, as Pliny tells us, in his "Natural History." Their eyes did not flash, but shone with a cold still light.
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