but ugly and horrible:  not only from the brutality signified, to us at least, by the flat triangular head and the heavy jaw, but by the look of malevolence and craft signified, to us at least, by the eye and the lip?  ‘To us at least,’ I say.  For it is an open question, and will be one, as long as the nominalist and the realist schools of thought keep up their controversy—­which they will do to the world’s end—­whether this seeming hideousness be a real fact:  whether we do not attribute to the snake the same passions which we should expect to find—­and to abhor—­in a human countenance of somewhat the same shape, and then justify our assumption to ourselves by the creature’s bites, which are actually no more the result of craft and malevolence than the bite of a frightened mouse or squirrel.  I should be glad to believe that the latter theory were the true one; that nothing is created really ugly, that the Fer-de-lance looks an hideous fiend, the Ocelot a beautiful fiend, merely because the outlines of the Ocelot approach more nearly to those which we consider beautiful in a human being:  but I confess myself not yet convinced.  ’There is a great deal of human nature in man,’ said the wise Yankee; and one’s human nature, perhaps one’s common-sense also, will persist in considering beauty and ugliness as absolute realities, in spite of one’s efforts to be fair to the weighty arguments on the other side.

These Fer-de-lances, be that as it may, are a great pest in St. Lucia.  Dr. Davy says that he ’was told by the Lieutenant-Governor that as many as thirty rat-tailed snakes were killed in clearing a piece of land, of no great extent, near Government House.’  I can well believe this, for about the same number were killed only two years ago in clearing, probably, the same piece of ground, which is infested with that creeping pest of the West Indies, the wild Guava-bush, from which guava-jelly is made.  The present Lieutenant-Governor has offered a small reward for the head of every Fer-de-lance killed:  and the number brought in, in the first month, was so large that I do not like to quote it merely from memory.  Certainly, it was high time to make a crusade against these unwelcome denizens.  Dr. Davy, judging from a Government report, says that nineteen persons were killed by them in one small parish in the year 1849; and the death, though by no means certain, is, when it befalls, a hideous death enough.  If any one wishes to know what it is like, let him read the tragedy which Sir Richard Schomburgk tells—­with his usual brilliance and pathos, for he is a poet as well as a man of science—­in his Travels in British Guiana, vol. ii. p. 255—­how the Craspedocephalus, coiled on a stone in the ford, let fourteen people walk over him without stirring, or allowing himself to be seen:  and at last rose, and, missing Schomburgk himself, struck the beautiful Indian bride, the ‘Liebling der ganzen Gesellschaft;’ and how she died in her bridegroom’s arms, with horrors which I do not record.