Basilisk (Bas`ilisk) , an animal fabled to have been hatched by a toad from the egg of an old cock, before whose breath every living thing withered and died, and the glance of whose eye so bewitched one to his ruin that the bravest could confront and overcome it only by looking at the reflection of it in a mirror, as Perseus (q.v.) was advised to do, and did, when he cut off the head of the Medusa; seeing itself in a mirror, it burst, it as said, at the sight.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Basili`des * Baskerville, John