Fennel was, according to our forefathers, held in esteem by the serpents themselves, and one scarcely wonders that this should be so, if it be true that “so soone as they taste of it they become young again, and with the juice thereof repair their sight.” How this juice is applied externally by the serpent is not explained, but it very naturally suggested the idea to the medical men of the Middle Ages that what was so good for serpents might prove equally valuable to suffering humanity, hence “to repair a man’s sight that is dim” nothing better than fennel could be found, though they hesitated to promise also to the human subject rejuvenescence. The Syrians, according to one venerable authority, had a most singular defence for their country, the land being full of snakes that would do no harm to the natives even if they trod upon them, but which eagerly assailed the people of any other nation and destroyed them. Naturally therefore the Syrians cherished such a valuable protection, though such a state of things would hardly accord with modern notions of free trade and the intercourse of nations. The discovery of one wonder frequently leads to knowledge of others, and Aristotle has a companion story in his “History of Animals,” of scorpions that in Caria sting to death the natives of the country, but do no harm to strangers. In like manner, according to Maundevile, in the island called Silha, wherever that may be, “the men of that yle seen comonely that the Serpentes and the wilde Bestes of that Countree nee will not don non harm, ne touchen with evylle, no strange man that entreth into that Contree, but only to men that ben born of the same Countree.” This differential treatment seems distinctly hard on the aborigines.[125] “It is observable,” quoth the author of the “Miracles of Art and Nature,” that “in Crete there is bred no Serpents or Venomous Beasts or Worms, Ravenous or hurtful Creatures, so their Sheep graze very securely without any Shepheard; yet if a Woman happen to bite a Man anything hard he will hardly be cured of it,” a statement which brings forth the very natural conclusion that “if this be true, then the last part of the Priviledge foregoing (of breeding no hurtful Creature) must needs be false.” Amongst various familiar country beliefs lasting even to the present day is the one summed up in the well-known expression, “deaf as an adder.” It has for centuries been an accepted belief that the adder lays one ear upon the ground, and closes the other with its tail, and it doubtless has its origin in that passage in the psalms of David where it states that “the deaf adder stoppeth her ears, and will not heed the voice of the charmer, charm he never so wisely,” and we meet with this idea over and over again in our own literature. Thus Shakespeare writes in King Henry VI.— “What! art thou, like the adder, waxen deaf? Be poisonous too.” And, again, in his Troilus and Cressida we find the passage—