The Psylli, according to Pliny, were so characteristically endowed with this immunity, that they made it a test of the legitimacy of their children; for they were accustomed to expose their new-born babes (only in doubtful cases, we may suppose) to the most venomous serpents they could find; assured that if their paternity was pure Psyllic, they would be quite unharmed. Of this tribe was the ambassador Hexagon, who, boasting of his power before the Roman consuls, submitted to the crucial test which they suggested, of being inclosed in a vessel swarming with poisonous reptiles, which, says the legendary story, hurt him not. The same historian tells us that the Psylli, who formerly inhabited the vicinity of the Greater Syrtis,--that is, the modern Tripoli and Barca,--were conquered and almost exterminated by the Nasamones, who possessed their land; but that a remnant fled to some distant region. It is not improbable that the present inhabitants of Sennaar, on the south of Egypt, may be the lineal descendants of these same Psylli; for, since Egypt was densely peopled and highly cultivated, a barbarous tribe could scarcely have made good their footing there; and as on the other side was the Great Desert of the Sâhra, and on the north the sea, there was no resource open to them but to creep along the desert edge of Egypt till they found a thinly-inhabited land sufficiently savage to enable them to form a settlement. The first region of this character that they could possibly find would be Nubia; and there it is most interesting to know that there exists a people at the present time, pretending to the same powers as the old Psylli. Bruce, whose testimony, at first much impugned, has come to be received with confidence, avouches that all the black people in the kingdom of Sennaar, whether Funge or Nuba, are perfectly armed against the bite of either scorpion or viper. They take the _Cerastes_--a little asp with two horns, of the most deadly venom--into their hands at all times, put them into their bosoms, and throw them at one another as children do balls, without ever irritating them by this usage so much as to make them bite. One day when the traveller was sitting with the brother of the prime minister of Sennaar, a slave of his brought a _Cerastes_, which he had just taken out of a hole, and was using with every sort of familiarity. Bruce expressed his suspicion that the teeth had been drawn, but was assured that they were not, both by the slave and by his master, who, taking the viper from him, wound it round his arm, and at the traveller's desire, ordered the servant to accompany him with it to his residence. Here Bruce, to test the power of the serpent, took a chicken by the neck, and made it flutter; the seeming indifference of the snake immediately gave place to eagerness, and he bit the fowl with great signs of anger, which died almost immediately. Bruce considers that the indifference was only