Note 104 — {38} Fourthly, Of Serpents, and Insects.[102]

Wood’s account (New-Eng. Prospect, l. c.) is worth comparing with Higginson’s (New-England’s Plantation, l. c.) and with Josselyn’s, both here and at pp. 23 and 114 of the Voyages. Wood justly says of this “most poisonous and dangerous creature,” that it is “nothing so bad as the report goes of him.... He is naturally,” he continues, “the most sleepy and unnimble creature that lives; never offering to leap or bite any man, if he be not trodden on first: and it is their desire, in hot weather, to lie in paths where the sun may shine on them; where they will sleep so soundly, that I have known four men to stride over them, and never awake her.... Five or six men,” he adds, “have been bitten by them; which, by using of snake-weed” (compare the preface to this, p. 119), “were all cured; never any yet losing his life by them. Cows have been bitten; but, being cut in divers places, and this weed thrust into their flesh, were cured. I never heard of any beast that was yet lost by any of them, saving one mare” (l. c.). Of other serpents, Wood mentions the black snake; and Josselyn, in his Voyages (l. c.), speaks of “infinite numbers, of various colours;” and especially of “one sort that exceeds all the rest; and that is the checkquered snake, having as many colours within the checkquers shadowing one another as there are in a rainbow.” He says again, “The water-snake will be as big about the belly as the calf of a man’s leg” which is, perhaps, the water-adder. Josselyn adds, “I never heard of any mischief that snakes did” (l. c.); and so Wood: “Neither doth any other kind of snakes” (the rattle-snake always excepted, as no doubt dangerous when trodden on) “molest either man or beast.” There are perhaps no worse prejudices in common life, than those which breed cruelty. In the Voyages (p. 23), our author makes mention “of a sea-serpent, or snake, that lay quoiled up like a cable upon a rock at Cape Ann. A boat passing by with English aboard, and two Indians, they would have shot the serpent: but the Indians disswaded them; saying, that, if he were not kill’d outright, they would be all in danger of their lives.” This was from “some neighbouring gentlemen in our house, who came to welcome me into the countrey;” and it seems, that, “amongst variety of discourse, they told me also of a young lyon (not long before) killed at Piscataway by an Indian;” which, indeed, was possibly not without foundation. And as to the serpent, compare a Report of a Committee of the Linnæan Society of New England relative to a large marine animal, supposed to be a serpent, seen near Cape Ann, Mass., in August, 1817 (Boston, 1817); which contains also a full account of a smaller animal—supposed not to differ, even in species, from the large—which was taken on the rocks of Cape Ann.—See also Storer, Report on the Reptiles of Mass.; Supplement, p. 410.