But what was to attack this terrible and unapproachable monster?
There is an old saying that "everything has its enemy"--and the
cockatrice quailed before the weasel. The basilisk might look
daggers, the weasel cared not, but advanced boldly to the
conflict. When bitten, the weasel retired for a moment to eat some
rue, which was the only plant the basilisks could not wither,
returned with renewed strength and soundness to the charge, and
never left the enemy till he was stretched dead on the plain. The
monster, too, as if conscious of the irregular way in which he
came into the world, was supposed to have a great antipathy to a
cock; and well he might, for as soon as he heard the cock crow he
expired.
The basilisk was of some use after death. Thus we read that its
carcass was suspended in the temple of Apollo, and in private
houses, as a sovereign remedy against spiders, and that it was
also hung up in the temple of Diana, for which reason no swallow
ever dared enter the sacred place.
The reader will, we apprehend, by this time have had enough of
absurdities, but still we can imagine his anxiety to know what a
cockatrice was like. The following is from Aldrovandus, a
celebrated naturalist of the sixteenth century, whose work on
natural history, in thirteen folio volumes, contains with much
that is valuable a large proportion of fables and inutilities.
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