Though all animals be fitted by nature for the life which their instincts teach them to pursue, naturalists have learned to recognize among them certain aberrant and mutilated forms, in which the type of the special class to which they belong seems distorted and degraded. They exist as the monster _families_ of creation, just as among families there appear from time to time monster _individuals_,—men, for instance, without feet, or hands, or eyes, or with their feet, hands, or eyes grievously misplaced,—sheep with their fore legs growing out of their necks, or ducklings with their wings attached to their haunches. Among these degraded races, that of the footless serpent, which “goeth upon its belly,” has been long noted by the theologian as a race typical, in its condition and nature, of an order of hopelessly degraded beings, borne down to the dust by a clinging curse; and, curiously enough, when the first comparative anatomists in the world give _their_ readiest and most prominent instance of degradation among the denizens of the natural world, it is this very order of footless reptiles that they select. So far as the geologist yet knows, the Ophidians did not appear during the Secondary ages, when the monarchs of creation belonged to the reptilian division, but were ushered upon the scene in the times of the Tertiary deposits, when the mammalian dynasty had supplanted that of the Iguanodon and Megalosaurus. Their ill omened birth took place when the influence of their house was on the wane, as if to set such a stamp of utter hopelessness on its fallen condition, as that set by the birth of a worthless or idiot heir on the fortunes of a sinking family. The degradation of the Ophidians consists in the absence of limbs,—an absence total in by much the greater number of their families, and represented in others, as in the boas and pythons, by mere abortive hinder limbs concealed in the skin; but they are thus not only _monsters through defect of parts_, if I may so express myself, but also _monsters through redundancy_, as a vegetative repetition of vertebra and ribs, to the number of three or four hundred, forms the special contrivance by which the want of these is compensated. I am also disposed to regard the poison-bag of the venomous snakes as a mark of degradation;—it seems, judging from analogy, to be a protective provision of a low character, exemplified chiefly in the invertebrate families,—ants, centipedes, and mosquitos,—spiders, wasps, and scorpions. The higher carnivora are, we find, furnished with unpoisoned weapons, which, like those of civilized man, are sufficiently effective, simply from the excellence of their construction, and the power with which they are wielded, for every purpose of assault or defence. It is only the squalid savages and degraded boschmen of creation that have their feeble teeth and tiny stings steeped in venom, and so made formidable. _Monstrosity through