This it was that seems to have led many a Parsi in the mofussil to offer oil at the temple of _Hanuman_ or to take flowers to the shrines of Mahomedan saints, whose aid they sought and who did not fail to appear to them, warning them and directing them, mostly in dreams. When they went to Bombay they had already absorbed the Hindu ideas concerning the spirits lurking in or near deserted tanks and wells and regarded them as the haunts of evil spirits such as _dâkans_ and _sankhinis_, _bhuts_ and _prets_. When, however, they dug wells in their own houses, in the absence of any well-spirit in the Zoroastrian pantheon and in the absence of any Hindu guardian-spirits of household wells, they appear to have invariably peopled their private wells with _sayyids_ and _pirs_ in whose virtues they had already come to believe and whom they had already venerated at their shrines and whom it was thus convenient for them to honour in their own houses by giving them a _sthan_ or _thanak_ in their wells. Thus we see that what was at first a purely Scriptural belief in the sanctity of water and its presiding genius is now a medley of many divergent elements owing to the fusion of divers local traditions with the fundamental tribal belief during the long intercourse of the community with the Hindus and Mahomedans. There is no country in the world where people live under more varied social and religious conditions and where they are more exposed to the influence of neighbours than in India and of all the cities of this cosmopolitan country there is none more cosmopolitan than the city of Bombay. Possibly, if we carry on local research in the Bombay Presidency and try to localise the beliefs and customs concerning well-worship, a good deal of fresh light may be thrown on this question. The work is by no means very difficult and with the aid of European folklorists, who have already shown us the way, it should be easy to carry on research throughout India. Sir Laurence Gomme, for instance, has given us in a luminous chapter on the localisation of primitive beliefs, a very skilful analysis of the different phases in which water-worship is still found in the United Kingdom. All the survivals of this cult he has allocated and explained by their ethnological bearing. CHAPTER XIV. ANALYSIS OF THE BRITISH CULTS.