1858.] Buddhism and Odin ism. 63 



India, which abounds in serpents, the most dangerous on account 

 of their poison, their size, and their force. As a consequence of 

 this abundance, the ancient legends of India are full of narrations 

 about dragons endowed with extraordinary qualities. (According 

 to those legends) they speak, they reason, they are their princes 

 and princesses, they perform miracles, they unite with men in 

 marriages, &c. &c. The Biographer of Hiouen Thsang makes men- 

 tion of tanks peopled with dragons in the neighbourhood of topes ; 

 and these dragons are so pious that having metamorphosed themselves 

 into men, they respectfully circumambulate the topes or stupas. The 

 same biographer inibrms us that the Buddhists figured dragons on 

 their sculptures ; he mentions for example a conveut at Pataliputra 

 which had pavilions with pillars ornamented with dragons.* Among 

 the ruins of other Buddhist towns we often find sculptures repre- 

 senting serpents and lizards. f In the cell of a dagoba, opened in 

 1820, near Columbo in Ceylon, there were found, among other ordi- 

 nary articles, clay images of serpents called the cobra di capello.% 

 The same taste for sculptures in wood representing interlaced 

 figures which was in vogue in Norway during the middle ages, may 

 now be seen in the Buddhist kingdom of Nepal ; and we thus find 

 at Kathmaudu, the capital, near the approach of a bridge a gateway 

 having over it a kind of coat of arms supported by two serpents. "§ 

 M. Holmboe devotes the seventeenth section of his work to the 

 examination of a class of long narrow mounds peculiar to Tibet and 

 Scandinavia. Dr. Thomson, in his travels in the Himalaya, noticed 

 one of these near Leh, in the province of Ladak, which was nearly 

 half a mile in length. " It consists," he says, " of two parallel 

 walls, twelve or fifteen feet apart, and nearly six feet high, the 

 intervals between which are filled up with stones and rubbish, and 

 the whole covered with a sloping roof. * * * On the roof are 

 laid large slabs of slate every one of which is covered with Tibetan 

 letters, and more rarely with a rude design of a temple." || The height 



* Hiouen Thsang, 128—51. 



t Sirr II. p. 332. Eitter, die Sttvpa's, p. 210. Forbes I. p. 415—16. 



t lb. 90—91. 



§ Egerton I. p. 189—190. 



|{ Thomson's Himalaya and Tibet, p. 183. 



