my part, shall always be pleased and interested to see them do so. I am greatly interested in snakes, and in reptiles generally. Their structure is wonderful, their powers are extraordinary, their ways and their habits, their whole life history, everything about them, is fascinating. They are not stupid, as they are erroneously supposed to be, and those who have been brought into intimate relations with them have found them capable of great and enduring affection.[1] For the sort of crusade, therefore, that has been got up against these maligned creatures, I altogether repudiate it, and I dissociate myself entirely from the many harsh, rude, unsympathetic and unappreciative things that have been said about them. Things, of course, are thus, or thus, according as we ourselves are, and snakes must be uninteresting indeed to some people, since—infandum!—in a place devoted, or that should be devoted, to the study of the living habits of the living animal, it is proposed, with a shout of "Eureka!", to substitute for the grace of motion and lithe sinuosity of the living serpent, its motionless, stuffed, dusty, dirty, faded, black, hard, cracky skin. A stuffed snake!—that awful production, from which all softness and smoothness is gone, out of which every intimate character is driven, from the very beginning, whilst the mere superficial resemblance fades slowly, day by day, till we have, at last, something like a vast
- ↑ See the uniquely interesting letter of Mr. Severn to the Times of July 25th, 1872, as quoted by Romanes in his Animal Intelligence (International Scientific Series), pp. 260–2.
