Nature of Serpents and the Basilisk

Lurking so as not to miss the opportune time for a blow. When it sees the shield, like a beast having fought the neck eagerly, it suddenly leaps upon its neck and suffocates it. The lizard called a salamander, if it enters a furnace or a vessel, cools itself. They say the hedgehog receives its offspring through the male's mouth, and cuts off the part that travels with them, and kills him. This one, having become pregnant, is destroyed by the children; for while still in her womb, having devoured the uterus, they will tear out the belly through the side.

The serpent, having grown old, becomes blind, and having fasted forty days, it wastes away in the body, and enters a narrow crack in a rock, and being dragged by force, it sheds its aged skin and is renewed. When it thirsts, it first lays aside the venom, and thus drinks water from the spring. Hunting mice, it blinds them and feeds, and having satisfied itself, it eats them. If it sees a man naked, it does not approach; but if clothed, it falls upon him.

The basilisk sends a deadly venom through the eye, so that the beholder is immediately killed. Its breath happens to be fiery, consuming places and thickets. They report that it comes into being in this way: if more serpents are shut up together and infect one another (since the animal is a contagion), each eats its neighbor; and the stronger serpent, consuming the weaker, and having been filled with the venom of all the serpents it devoured, becomes a basilisk possessing a most terrible venom, such as killing from the eye alone.

The cantharus, having fashioned a circular shape from the round egg, rolls like a cylinder. They say it is upon the earth for six months, and sows into the egg-sphere, and bears male cantharus; for a female cantharus never exists. And the Egyptians, because of such a nature, revere it, transforming it into a sun, since it rolls a sphere, and they depict the stars in the shape of serpents, because their course is made oblique.

As for the ants, gathering the grain through the midst of the kernels, they cut them so that it does not ferment; and they remain through the winter without going out, having procured sufficient food through the summer. And the fly, being a worm-like creature, feeds upon sweet waters; and if someone drinks greedily, it sinks down into it, because of the great smoothness of the water being drunk. And it suffers no small harm from this, as it sucks the flesh of the blood from it and grows; yet it proves insatiable in its thirst for blood. And often, when doctors are required to remove it, it is not revived until it has been ruptured. And the cat is an enemy to the asps and to the other venomous reptiles; the ibis is an enemy to the serpents, and to the locusts, and to the grasshoppers. To the crested ones, and to the scorpions, and to the other small reptiles, the hawk has become death-dealing.

And this is sympathetic to man; for if he sees it dead and without burial, he is cast down and throws earth upon it. And after the making of the world, later God created man, by breaking the cold with the hot, and by binding the moist with the dry, and by releasing the dry again to the moist, He composed him, having all the parts of the whole. For just as the earth, standing with the cold air poured out within itself, has the fire suspended upon it in order, and again the water surrounding it on every side; so also is man, as the earth is by nature a firmament of bones, and standing with the flesh poured upon him, he receives the spiritual breath through the nostrils, as if he were allotted the innate heat and cooling power like the air. For indeed the air above our heads, cooling the fiery nature of the air, makes it beneficial for all the life of animals. And the heat which exists within the body of man melts the phlegm to excess, just like a crystalline draught of water. And the veins and the blood within them preserve imitations of rivers. Thus God, having fashioned man from the earth and having given him a rational soul, intended for him to enjoy the enjoyment of paradise [...].

Then, having heard the commandment, He transferred him into the earth, leaving him to have a toilsome life upon it. Having known his wife Eve, she bore him two sons.