What very little he knew about snakes, then, was learned from Shakspeare—we say Shakspeare, for what other author has been read and re-read, and committed to memory, and quoted during the last three centuries like the Bard of Avon? The bard, genius though he was, and wide his field of information, was certainly _not_ a naturalist. Nor did he make any pretensions to be one. He was as unconscious of the errors in natural history which he was handing down to posterity, as he was unconscious of his own enduring fame; or that he would be ‘the immortal bard’ three hundred years later, with every probability of ever living in the human mind as such. His idea of the poisonous tongue of a snake was the prevalent one of his day. It was an inherited prejudice, which he had never stopped to question, any more than nine hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand of his readers have ever stopped to question the fact of an adder’s _tongue_ being poisonous, Shakspeare having affirmed that it is so. People do not read Shakspeare to learn natural history, you say. True; but his poetry, his similes, take hold of the mind, fix themselves in the memory, and take root; and an assertion, as in the case of the gentle little ‘blindworm,’ takes very deep root, as it seems, and thrives for three hundred years; or naturalists of the present day would not feel called upon to explain that it is neither ‘blind,’ nor ‘deaf,’ nor ‘venomous.’ Still you reject the idea that Shakspeare through his immense and universal popularity is responsible for a ridiculous error. Not Shakspeare alone, then, or culpably so. But since the idea has prevailed for thousands of years, even to the present time, and since persons are more likely to quote Shakspeare on the subject than any other author, let us glance at the literature of Shakspeare’s time, and endeavour to account for his fixed impression as to a serpent’s tongue being poisonous. Let us also try to recall from any one of the writers of the same era, or those who wrote in English previously, any single line on the present subject that has become so engrafted on the mind, so incorporated with our education, as those, for example, above quoted. There was a host of other play-writers in Shakspeare’s time, but very few naturalists. Poetry, plays, and Protestantism characterized the literature of the period. But familiar to us _by name_ as are his contemporaries, it will be as easy to find one educated person who has read the whole of their works, as it would be to find one educated person who has not read Shakspeare.