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 
