If I should go about to make any long discourse of venomous beasts or worms bred in England, I should attempt more than occasion itself would readily offer, sith we have very few worms, but no beasts at all, that are thought by their natural qualities to be either venomous or hurtful.  First of all, therefore, we have the adder (in our old Saxon tongue called an atter), which some men do not rashly take to be the viper.  Certes, if it be so, then is not the viper author of the death of her[3] parents, as some histories affirm, and thereto Encelius, a late writer, in his De re Metallica, lib. 3, cap. 38, where he maketh mention of a she adder which he saw in Sala, whose womb (as he saith) was eaten out after a like fashion, her young ones lying by her in the sunshine, as if they had been earthworms.  Nevertheless, as he nameth them viperas, so he calleth the male echis. and the female echidna, concluding in the end that echis is the same serpent which his countrymen to this day call ein atter, as I have also noted before out of a Saxon dictionary.  For my part I am persuaded that the slaughter of their parents is either not true at all, or not always (although I doubt not but that nature hath right well provided to inhibit their superfluous increase by some means or other), and so much the rather am I led hereunto for that I gather by Nicander that of all venomous worms the viper only bringeth out her young alive, and therefore is called in Latin vipera quasivivipara, but of her own death he doth not (to my remembrance) say anything.  It is testified also by other in other words, and to the like sense, that “Echis id est vipera sola ex serpentibus non ova sed animalia parit."[4] And it may well be, for I remember that I have read in Philostratus, De vita Appollonii, how he saw a viper licking her young.  I did see an adder once myself that lay (as I thought) sleeping on a molehill, out of whose mouth came eleven young adders of twelve or thirteen inches in length apiece, which played to and fro in the grass one with another, till some of them espied me.  So soon therefore as they saw my face they ran again into the mouth of their dam, whom I killed, and then found each of them shrouded in a distinct cell or pannicle in her belly, much like unto a soft white jelly, which maketh me to be of the opinion that our adder is the viper indeed.  The colour of their skin is for the most part like rusty iron or iron grey, but such as be very old resemble a ruddy blue; and as once in the year (to wit, in April or about the beginning of May) they cast their old skins (whereby as it is thought their age reneweth), so their stinging bringeth death without present remedy be at hand, the wounded never ceasing to swell, neither the venom to work till the skin of the one break, and the other ascend upward to the heart, where it finisheth the natural effect, except the juice of dragons (in Latin called dracunculus minor)