160 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



its effect on the earlier races, and what great 

 things resulted from it, when the floating scattered 

 threads of all strange sensations and experiences, 

 all unaccountable things, were gathered and woven 

 into the many-coloured and quaintly figured cloth 

 of religion, anthropology has for some time past 

 been engaged in telling us. 



We have seen in the history of palaeontology 

 that, when the fossil remains of some long-extinct 

 animal have been discovered, in some district still 

 perhaps inhabited by one or more representatives 

 of archaic form, naturalists have concluded that the 

 type was peculiar to the district; but subsequently 

 fresh remains have been discovered in other widely 

 separated districts, and then others, until it has 

 been established that the type once supposed local 

 has, at one time or another, ranged over a very 

 large portion of the habitable globe. Something 

 similar has been the case in the extension of the 

 area over which evidences of serpent-worship have 

 been brought to light by inquiries into the early 

 history of mankind. It had existed in Phoenicia, 

 India, Babylonia, and, in a mild form, in Greece 

 and Italy in Europe; Persia was added, and, little 

 by little, Cashmir, Cambodia, Thibet, China, Ceylon, 

 the Kalmucks; in Lithuania it was universal; it 

 was found in Madagascar and Abyssinia; the area 

 over which it once flourished or still flourishes in 

 Africa grows wider and wider, and promises to take 

 in the entire continent; across the Atlantic it 

 extended over a greater part of North, Central, and 



