And in _King John_, Act ii. Scene 1, Randolph says to King Philip, ‘France, thou may’st hold a serpent by the tongue!’ Not snakes only, but toads, lizards, spiders, and other ‘creeping things,’ were thought venomous in Shakspeare’s time. Song in _Midsummer Night’s Dream_: ‘You spotted snakes, with double tongue.’ Then, in appeal to the ‘serpents’ not to injure the Fairy Queen: ‘Newts and blindworms, do no wrong.’ The nearest approach to a scientific work on natural history written in English at that time was a curious volume published in 1608, in whose folio pages may be seen most astonishing ‘Serpentes,’ combinations of worms and feathered fowls, saurian, ophidian, and batrachian, wonderfully adorned with horns, gills, wings, spear-shaped or forked tongues, and arrow-shaped tails. The zoological illustrations of that work give us some idea of what a snake was supposed to be. Among them is one with a human head, and another with a crown, because he is ‘the King of Serpentes for his Magnitude or Greatnesse.’ There is also a ‘Dragon’ with horns, wings, scales, claws, two rows of robust teeth, and an arrow-headed tongue. Mingled fable and fancy with some few facts, these anomalies are solemnly described as ‘The Naturall Historie of Serpentes,’ the said serpents including bees, wasps, ‘frogges,’ toads, earthworms, lizards, spiders, etc., and a ‘cockatrice.’ The author, E. Topsell, addresses the ‘gentle and pious Reader’ on the ‘publishing of this Treatise of Venomous Beasts,’ and more particularly of ‘Serpentes, Divine, Morall, and Naturell, their Poyson and Bitings, since the gentle and pious Reader will see how that the Historie of Serpentes begineth at the Creation.’ [Illustration: Fabulous tongues.] Thus we see that the ideal snake was a religious principle, carried out in illustrations and architectural embellishments, where ‘that old serpent the devil’ was depicted as a creature as terrible as imagination could conceive it; and of course with a highly-developed tongue in the form of a dart or a spear, more or less alarming. Far in advance of Topsell, and far in advance of England, were the naturalists of Southern Europe. Gesner, professor of philosophy at Zurich, published his _Historia Animalium_ in 1551; and Aldrovanus, professor of philosophy and physic at Bologna, wrote thirteen folio volumes of natural history, four only of which were published during his lifetime, and the rest after his death, which was in 1605. These two authors, though out of date at the present day, have left their names perpetuated in plants and animals examined by them.