man in the higher animal realm; while lowerdown,
in the vegetable kingdom, we find the weirdly
striped and spotted stalks and leaves and flowers
of baleful plants. And again, in a subtler,
profounder analogy, felt by all people, and stated,
though not analysed, in all languages, the speaking
multitude, unconscious of the poetry of their
daily phrase, and the inspired writing poet,
express moral purity by spotlessness; to them
virginity is immaculate; stripes are the symbol,
as they are the horrid proofs of slavery; freedom
is equality, uniformity.

Aspic and peliade look much alike at first
glance, and feel much alike at first bite. So
that different witnesses offer, for and against
either, charges that really lie in common
against both. One authority reports, as proper
to the peliade, a greater venomousness and
agility, which another attributes as specific
quality or defect of the aspic. The contradiction
comes of generalising from local or other
accidental conditions, such as season of the year,
hour or temperature, or atmospheric quality of
the day, the Cassius-like leanness or recent
full-fedness of the viper. The royal psalmist, aptly
enough for his purpose, compares backbiters to
"adders, whose poison is under their lips." The
difference— which is important— is to the moral
disadvantage of the former, whose force of malice
grows by what it feeds on. The better, creeping
reptile's store of venom diminishes not only at
every hostile attack, but by simple process of
deglutition. He cannot have swallowed a
hapless frog, owing to his muscular mechanism,
without having expressed in the process a
certain portion of the virus in the reservoir. So
that an aspic is like any one else after dinner, a
more amiable creature than he is before meals.
Again, if he have already bitten or bit at A. and
B. at noon, C. gets off with a comparatively
harmless nip towards sundown.

Of the three species, the aspic is the most
prevalent, the pelias lamentably so, and the
ammodytes rarest in France. The last-named, who
wears a specifically distinctive wart on his
nose, affects the warmer countries, and is hardly
found except in the south-east of France. From
the others— unless it be a strip lying along the
British Channel and the Belgian frontier— no
large district of Napoleon's home dominion can
be said to be quite free; while in certain
departments of the east, south, centre, and west,
they are a swarming pest.

A few years ago the prefect of a certain
department, liberating himself by a vigorous effort,
of common sense from the benumbing coils of
administrative habit, caused a bounty of fifty
centimes (fourpence-halfpenny) to be offered
for every dead viper. In a few months twelve
thousand heads were brought in. The department
of La Haute Marne, in North-Eastern
France, has an area of two thousand four
hundred square miles— say a third larger than
Kent or Somersetshire. A like price having
been set there on vipers' heads in 1856, by
1860 more than fifty thousand had been paid
for. But so far was this official slaughter— let
alone gratuitous private assassination— from
exterminating the enemy, that in 1861, when the
bounty had been reduced one-half, seven
thousand and thirty-six triangular heads, ugly—-
bills, were presented at the paying bureau.
The Baron de Girardot, prefect of La Loire
Inférieure, in 1859, on growing occasion of
accidents befalling men, women, children, flocks,
herds, and sportsmen's dogs (the excellent
administrator's zeal was quickened by that of the
mighty hunter), addressed a circular to
physicians, health officers, veterinary surgeons, and
others in his department, asking information
on the serpentine question. Among other
responses, he received this from the mayor of
Boussay; its statements were re-confirmed to
Dr. Viandgrandmarais by the curé of the
commune: "In August, 1859, at the Clemencière,
a farm-house built a few years before in the
marshy part of Boussay, there was a prodigious
number of serpents roving all over the
establishment, hissing in the walls, hanging over
the doors. A woman killed eight of them one
day. It was found, on careful watching, that
they issued from under the hearth. Investigation
in that quarter led to the discovery of such
a quantity of eggs, that a double decalitre (a
measure of about twenty wine quarts) could not
hold them; and beneath the stone were fifteen
hundred live serpents of different sizes." These,
it is true, were not of the venomous sort— mere
innocents, comparatively— though at the fireside
their room is pleasanter than their company.
Dr. Avenel, of Rouen, says he has " counted a
hundred vipers asleep on a space of a hundred
metres square." The ingenious Mr. Toussenel
writes in his last book— so amusing, despite
its gloomy title, Tristia— that, in the summer
of 1829, he killed more than two hundred
on an estate of a few acres in the valley
of the Loire; and again, that in 1861 he
knew, by his own experience or from that of
brother-sportsmen, of fifty places in other
departments " where thirty and forty vipers were
killed of a morning." "They swarmed in the
farm-yards, and courts, and garden plots." He
cites an occasion where three of his dogs were
bitten within five consecutive minutes; whereupon
in the next following fifteen he and his
two companions did to death twenty aspics.
From a letter written in the last days of March,
1861, by the proprietor of a brick-kiln near
Angers, he quotes as follows: " I have been
using a new kind of fuel for brick-baking— to
wit, aspics. You must know that all the snakes
of the neighbourhood had gone into winter
quarters among my fagots, so that I could not
deliver these to the flames without consigning
to the same fate an innumerable multitude of
hissing spirits, that swore and danced in the
furnace like so many devils in a pot of holy
water. I don't know what had become of us,
if we had put off the kindling to another
fortnight."

If you seek other proofs of the " deluge of
aspics" than are to be read in print, they are
not hard to find. If, taking heed to your steps,