Quite famous in their day were the chameleons of Mlle. de Saudéry, a seventeenth century novelist. One of the kindest-hearted women in France, she was continually giving to the poor, or appealing for the distressed; so that her fame to-day rests rather upon her charities than her writings. Her chameleons excited much curiosity, and strangers went to see them, as one of the sights of the city. The last glimpse we get of them in history is a post-mortem one, in 1698, when Dr. Martin Lister visited Paris, and called upon the venerable novelist--then in her ninety-first year. She made herself very agreeable, and finally, he says, took him to her closet and showed him “the skeletons of two chameleons which she had kept near four years alive. In winter she lodged them in cotton, and in the fiercest weather kept them under a ball of copper filled with hot water.” The good lady would have sympathized with Antonia, Mark Antony’s beautiful daughter, who petted the murenæ in her fish-ponds, and of one in particular became so fond that she fastened gold ear-rings to its head--a favor the poor fish could well have spared. Washington Irving upheld the right of harmless snakes to live in peace; and a pretty story is told of his preventing a guest from killing a little striped adder--pointing the lesson of tolerance by gently stroking his protégé. The great Goethe was in full accord with this feeling. He kept a snake for some months, feeding it himself, and caring for it, until his interest, scientific at first, became personal and affectionate. The creature became quite friendly, and would uprear its head in recognition, whenever the master approached. The poet’s mother once alluded to his favorite--rather femininely--as “a nasty thing.” “Oh,” said her son, “if the snake would but spin himself a house, and turn into a butterfly to oblige her, we should hear no more about ‘nasty things.’ But we can’t all be butterflies.... Poor snake! they should treat you better. How he looks at me! how he rears his head! Is it not as if he knew that I was taking his part?” Perhaps, however, even Irving and Goethe, despite their theories, would have shrunk from the extraordinary pet which Sir Joseph Banks kept in his library, much to the horror of unsuspecting guests. It was, in fact, a boa-constrictor!