of them, and can only by great self-control, and under a sense of real agitation, force myself to touch one.  A considerable proportion of the English race would feel much as I do; but the remainder do not.  I have questioned numbers of persons of both sexes, and have been astonished at the frequency with which I have been assured that they had no shrinking whatever from the sight of the wriggling mysterious reptile.  Some persons, as is well known, make pets of them; moreover, I am told that there is no passage in Greek or Latin authors expressive of that form of horror which I myself feel, and which may be compared to what is said to be felt by hydrophobic sufferers at the undulating movements of water.  There are numerous allusions in the classics to the venom fang or the crushing power of snakes, but not to an aversion inspired by its form and movement.  It was the Greek symbol of Hippocrates and of healing.  There is nothing of the kind in Hebrew literature, where the snake is figured as an attractive tempter.  In Hindu fables the cobra is the ingenious and intelligent animal, corresponding to the fox in ours.  Serpent worship was very widely spread.  I therefore doubt whether the antipathy to the snake is very common among mankind, notwithstanding the instinctive terror that their sight inspires in monkeys.

The other instance I may adduce is that of the horror of blood which is curiously different in animals of the same species and in the same animals at different times.  I have had a good deal of experience of the behaviour of oxen at the sight of blood, and found it to be by no means uniform.  In my South African travels I relied chiefly on half-wild slaughter oxen to feed my large party, and occasionally had to shoot one on every second day.  Usually the rest of the drove paid no particular heed to the place of blood, but at other rare times they seemed maddened and performed a curious sort of war-dance at the spot, making buck-leaps, brandishing their horns, and goring at the ground.  It was a grotesque proceeding, utterly unlike the usual behaviour of cattle.  I only witnessed it once elsewhere, and that was in the Pyrenees, where I came on a herd that was being driven homewards.  Each cow in turn, as it passed a particular spot, performed the well-remembered antics.  I asked, and learned that a cow had been killed there by a bear a few days previously.  The natural horror at blood, and it may be the consequent dislike of red, is common among mankind; but I have seen a well-dressed child of about four years old poking its finger with a pleased innocent look into the bleeding carcase of a sheep hung up in a butcher’s shop, while its nurse was inside.

The subject of character deserves more statistical investigation than it has yet received, and none have a better chance of doing it well than schoolmasters; their opportunities are indeed most enviable.  It would be necessary to approach the subject wholly without prejudice, as a pure matter of observation, just as if the children were the fauna and flora of hitherto undescribed species in an entirely new land.