ur. The modern Greeks denominate it
"the fish of St. Christopher," from a legend which relates that it was
trodden on by that saint, when he bore his divine burden across an arm of
the sea. Some species of _Echini_, fossilized, and seen frequently in
Norfolk, are termed by the ignorant peasantry, and considered, _Fairy
Loaves_, to take which, when found, is highly unlucky.

The _Amphisbaena_, from its faculty of moving backwards or forwards at
pleasure, has been thought to have a head at either extremity of its
reptile body, but close inspection proves this opinion false. The
fascinating power of the _Rattlesnake_, of which so many stories have in
times past been related, and which was asserted to exist in its glittering
eyes, has been of late years resolved into that extreme nervous terror of
its victim (at sight of so certain a foe) which deprives it of the power
of motion, and causes it to fall, an unresisting prey, into the reptile's
jaws. We may here pause to observe, _en passant_, that the antipathy which
people of all ages and nations have felt against every reptile of the
serpent tribe, from the harmless worm to the hosts of deadly "dragons"
which infest the torrid zone, and the popular opinion that all are
venomous, often in spite of experience, seems to be not so much
superstition, as a terror of the species, implanted, since the fall, in
our bosoms, by the same Divine Being who at that period pronounced the
serpent to be the most accursed beast of the field.

(_To be continued_.)

* * * * *

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TAIT'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

Nothing if not political appears to be the order of the new magazine and
other literary enterprises of the present day. Is this good policy in
itself? it may be so from the vivifying aid it lends to the springs of
imaginative writing. We have therefore no right to complain of the
_leaven_ of Mr. Tait's Magazine: it is anything but dull: _e.g._ the life
and jauntiness of the following paper is very pleasant, shrewd, and clever:

_The Martinet_.

The "Martinet" is the name of a genus, not of a species; the title of a
race variously feathered, but having specific qualities in common. There
is your military martinet, your clerical martinet, your legal martinet,
and the martinet of common life, ("_Gallicrista fastidiosa communis_,"
Linnaeus would class him,) who is to the others what the house-sparrow is
to the rest of h