That serpents and other poisonous reptiles could be deprived of their venom by enchantment and thus rendered harmless is in accord with the teachings of the Bible. Thus we read in Ecclesiastes (x. 11): “Surely the serpent will bite without enchantment,” _i.e._ unless it be enchanted and its bite disenvenomed. A curious superstition concerning the adder is referred to in the Psalms (lviii. 4, 5), where the wicked are said to be “like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; which will not hearken to the voice of charmers, charming never so wisely.” The Lord is also represented by Jeremiah (viii. 17) as threatening to “send serpents, cockatrices, among you, which will not be charmed, and they shall bite you.” It does not seem to have occurred to the prosecutor that the defendants might be locusts, which would not be excommunicated. The objection that God has sent these insects as a scourge, and that to anathematize them would be to fight against him, is met by saying that to have recourse to the offices of the Church is an act of religion, which does not resist, but humbly recognizes the divine will and makes use of the means appointed for averting the divine wrath and securing the divine favour. After the advocates had finished their pleadings, the case was summed up by the episcopal procurator substantially as follows: “The arguments offered by the counsel for the defence against the proceedings instituted by the inhabitants as complainants are worthy of careful consideration and deserve to be examined soberly and maturely, because the bolt of excommunication should not be hurled recklessly and at random (_à la volée_), being a weapon of such peculiar energy and activity that, if it fails to strike the object against which it is hurled, it returns to smite him, who hurled it.” [This notion that an anathema is a dangerous missile to him who hurls it unlawfully or for an unjust purpose, retroacting like an Australian boomerang, survives in the homely proverb: “Curses, like chickens, come home to roost.”] The bishop’s proctor reviews the speeches of the lawyers, but seems to have his brains somewhat muddled by them. “It is truly a deep sea,” he says, “in which it is impossible to touch bottom. We cannot tell why God has sent these animals to devour the fruits of the earth; this is for us a sealed book (_lettres closes_).” He suggests it may be “because the people turn a deaf ear to the poor begging at their doors,” and goes off into a long eulogy on the beauty of charity, with an anthology of extracts from various writers in praise of alms-giving, among which is one from Eusebius descriptive of hell as a cold region, where the wailing and gnashing of teeth are attributed to the torments of eternal frost instead of everlasting fire (_liberaberis ab illo frigore, in quo erit fletus et stridor dentium_). Again, the plague of insects may be due to irreverence shown in the churches, which, he