[2]...
[2] Here follows a discourse on ancient boar hunting, exalting
it above the degenerate sports of the day. This ends the
chapter on "savage beasts."--W.
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.
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