“Pleasure and revenge have ears more deaf than adders.” In Orlando Furioso, too, we find an interesting reference to the old fancy:— “He flies me now, nor more attends my pain Than the deaf adder heeds the charmer’s strain.” Many varieties of serpents were known to the ancients, and some of them, as the Cerastes, are quite recognizable from the descriptions given, but of others we have no means of identification. The two-headed Amphisbæna, for example, that was credited with such venomous malignity that nothing but twice the normal power of offence sufficed for its deadly attack. The Amphisbæna was an article of faith with Nicander, who was the first to introduce it to the scientific world of his name, and it is referred to by Galen, Pliny, Ælian, and many other ancient writers, who gravely describe this especially objectionable reptile, “a small kind of serpent which moveth backward and forward, and hath two heads, one at either extreme.” The creature is now entirely lost to science. [Illustration: FIG. 23.] Aldrovandus, in his history of serpents, gives an illustration of the basilisk, a serpentine form, but having eight legs, and on its head a crown. Another of his figures shows us a serpentine form again, this time with two legs, the moderation in this direction being fully compensated by the gift of seven heads of human form, while another has the serpent-like body, but to this are added two legs and feet like those of a cock, and the creature has six cocks’ heads. All these creatures are put forth and described in all seriousness, so it is evident that the author must either himself have been excessively credulous, or that he must have expected to find his readers so. It is manifest that such inventions are of the lamest possible type. Nothing could be easier or more fatuous than to fill a folio volume with serpents having three cats’ heads, five lions’ heads, seven bisons’ heads, or twenty rats’ heads, and distribute legs in the same liberal and senseless manner. His drawing, fig. 23, of a two-headed lizard is the nearest approach we can give our readers to the Amphisbæna. Burton tells us that in Samogitia, a small province in Poland, the people nourish amongst them “a kind of four-footed serpents, above three handfuls in length, which they worship as their household gods, and if mischance do happen to any of their family, it is imputed presently to some want of due observations of these ugly creatures.” Some old writers tell us of hairy serpents, and depict a thing something like the well-known larva of the tiger-moth, the caterpillar popularly known as the “woolly bear,” and familiar enough to all dwellers in the country, the only difference, though that a very serious one, being that the woolly bear is barely three inches long, while the hairy serpents are stretched to any number of feet that the credulity of the narrator will permit. [Illustration: FIG. 24.]