397 
Dr. Wainwright. — Well, there are two more points on which I should be 
glad to have information. We know that certain classes of serpents are 
poisonous, and I should like to know if such are found in a fossil state ; 
also, if the Egyptians always represented serpents as cumbent. 
Mr. Cooper. — The deductions given towards the close of my paper are 
deductions from the mythology of Egypt, and my own faith winds up the 
last paragraph, which I believe to be orthodox. As to fossil serpents 
being venomous or non-venomous I do not know how that may be borne 
out ; I believe that they were not venomous. The Serpent of Good is always 
represented by the Egyptians as upright, and the Serpent of Evil as crawling, 
and that is generally the only distinction which they make. 
Rev. G. Henslow. — Fossil serpents are very rare ; geologists know 
very little about them ; but in the Eocene clay snakes have been found, 
which Professor Owen considers as probably frequenting water. 
Mr. Cooper. — The water-snake is never represented in Egypt. 
Mr. Henslow. — There is a snake-like form of animal among the Assyrian 
monuments. 
Mr. Cooper. — It is an emblem of Hea, the Assyrian water deity. With 
respect to the eel, the Egyptians knew of it, but they dedicated it to the God 
of Darkness. As to the boat, there is quite evidence enough about the 
character of the mystic bark of the sun — the Divine Baris — without -troubling 
ourselves about it in this case. The Nile was the great highway of the 
Egyptians, and it is natural enough to represent the sun as travelling by 
water — the only road he could travel by ; more especially as they believed, 
with the early Pelasgians mentioned by Herodotus, that the world was 
entirely surrounded by an impassable ocean in which the deities sailed and 
beyond which they resided, a theory which has an Indian analogue in the 
cosmos of the Buddhists, and, if I mistake not, is also preserved in the Eddas 
of the Scandinavian nations. If they had travelled as the Assyrians did, 
by land, they would have represented the sun as walking, or have put him, 
as other nations did, on the backs of horses — as for instance the Greeks, who 
put Phaeton in his quadriga. 
Rev. C. A. Row. — From the book called “ The Ritual of the Dead,” do 
you conclude that the Egyptian theology was of an exclusively pantheistic 
character ? I want to know whether the idea of deity involved freedom of 
will, or fate — whether it conceived of him, or not, as a living person ? Also, 
which is in Semitic Babylonian, was copied b.c. 660 from a Chaldean docu- 
ment at Erech, at least as old as the 17th century b.c., and contains many of 
the events of the flood, but given in a legendary style, and with certain 
minor differences, which show that it embodies a distinct and independent 
tradition belonging to distinct peoples. Mr. G. Smith, when reading a paper on 
this inscription before the Society of Biblical Archaeology, in November, 1872, 
remarked on the value of the histories that are stored in the mounds and ruined 
cities now buried in the plains of Chaldea, once the cradle of civilization. — [Ed.] 
