366 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



several times, but were never able to reach it. The expedition 

 has made important corrections in previous charts, and has se- 

 cured other important results. 



Sioeditih Polar Expedition. — By telegram from Stockholm, Octo- 

 ber 1, 1868, it seems that this expedition had by the last of Au- 

 gust reached 81° 10'. From Spitzbergen, Greenland could not be 

 reached on account of immense ice-fields. Several soundings 

 showed 2,100 fathoms. 



Ancient Buddhist Bemains.— 'Mr. Fergusson, at the 1868 meeting 

 of the British Association, read a paper in which he stated that he 

 believed that tree and serpent worship had prevailed in the world 

 from the earliest times. The history of the tree and serpent in 

 the book of Genesis, he believed, was a remnant of that old 

 worship, and he thought the curse of the serpent was a curse upon 

 that old impure religion. He showed most elaborately that this 

 form of worship found its way among the Greeks, thence among 

 the Romans, thence to Scandinavia and every part of Europe. 

 Tree and serpent worship prevailed in Africa to a large extent, 

 and there were evidences of its existence in America. It was 

 the very oldest form of primitive superstition. The gods of the 

 oldest race were always the tree and the serpent. The architec- 

 tural remains in the various parts of the world testified to this fact. 

 He expressed strongly his feelings that architecture was a very 

 valuable ethnographic aid to the student; that it was a more 

 reasonable and more tangible test of race than language. When 

 language was very clear and distinct it was very positive and 

 certain, but there were many cases in which language failed, and 

 then architecture came into play. There was not in the whole 

 world a single building which was not developed out of some build- 

 ing that preceded it, and which did not express the history and 

 feeling of the people who erected it more clearly than any book 

 ever written. 



