With ever so praiseworthy an _intention_ of telling ‘the Truth,’ Lawson did not possess the scientific knowledge to enable him to guard against error. Neither did Colonel Beverley, who wrote a _History of Virginia_, published in London in 1722, and who perpetuated the ‘stinging tail.’ ‘There is likewise a Horn Snake, so called from a Sharp Horn it carries in its Tail, with which it assaults anything that offends it, with that Force that, as it is said, it will strike its Tail into the Butt End of a Musket, from whence it is not able to disengage itself.’ A few years later, Catesby went over the same ground as a professed naturalist, and afforded a more rational account of this ‘horn snake,’ to which he assigned the name of _Vipera aquatica_, ‘Water viper,’ or ‘Water rattlesnake.’ ‘Not that it hath a Rattle. The Tail of this Viper is small towards the End, and terminates in a blunt, horny Point, about half an Inch long. This harmless little Thing has given a dreadful Character to its Owner, imposing a Belief on the Credulous that he is the terrible Horn Snake armed with Death at both Ends, thus attributing to him another Instrument of Death besides that he had before, though in reality of equal Truth with that of the Two-headed Amphisbæna. Yet we are told that this fatal Horn, by a Jerk of the Tail, not only mortally wounds Men and other Animals but if by Chance struck into a young Tree, whose Bark is more easily penetrated than an old one, the Tree instantly withers, and turns black and dies.’[52] Unfortunately, in mentioning the ‘Horn snake,’ many subsequent writers, seizing on the marvellous rather than the rational, have omitted the qualifying ‘it is said to inflict a wound,’ and Catesby’s exposition of the absurdity; thus handing down as a fact that the tail was truly a terrible weapon! It was probably this water viper which Chateaubriand had in his mind when, towards the end of that century, he described the ‘Prickly snake, short and thick. It has a sting in its tail, the wound of which is mortal!’ Chateaubriand was much quoted for a long period.