surpass our own life-shattering worms, the cobra or the rattlesnake.
The snakes of antiquity, it is true, have come down to us dignified and made terrible by the honors and fears of past ages, when the Egyptians and the Greeks bound the aspic round the heads of their idols as the most regal of tiaras, and crowned in fancy the adder and the cerastes; when nations tenanted their sacred groves with even more sacred serpents, entrusted to their care all that kings held most precious and the gems that were still undug, confided the diamond mines to one and — more valued then than diamonds — the carbuncle to another, deifying some of their worms, and giving the names of others to their gods. But the actual facts known to science of modern snakes, the deadlier sorts of the ophidians, invest them with terrors equal to any creatures of fable, and with the superstitious might entitle them to equal honors with the past objects of Ammonian worship and still the reverence of all Asia, the central figures in the rites of Ops or Thermuthis, or whatever we may call the old gods now.
Science has now driven out Superstition, planting a more beautiful growth of beliefs in its place, and of these beliefs Mr. Ruskin is the trustee and the python, the oracle, the artistic Apollo.
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It is one of the penalties of extended empire that frontiers shall be constantly vexed, just as the sea along its margin is forever astir. But it is seldom that duties as a Great Power bring a nation into reluctant collision with such a strange, half-mythical folk as the Nagas of the northeastern frontiers of India with whom the English have periodically to fight. The Af-
