It does not seem at first to have made much progress in the valley of the Ganges, where the ground was preoccupied by the Vaishnava group, but to have been generally adopted in Rajputana, especially among the Jats, who were almost certainly the descendants of the White Huns or Ephthalites, and it seems also to have been early carried south by the Brahmans, when they undertook to instruct the Dravidians in the religion of the Puranas. That of the Vedas never seems to have been known in the south, and it was not till after the Vedas had been superseded by the new system, that the Brahmanical religion was introduced among the southern people. It is also, it is to be feared, only too true that no attempt has yet been made to ascertain what the religion of the Dravidians was before the northern Brahmans induced them to adopt either the Jaina or the Vaishnava or Saiva forms of faith. It is possible that among the Pandu Kolis, and other forms of ‘Rude Stone Monuments’ that are found everywhere in the south, we may find the fossil remains of the old Dravidian faith before they adopted that of the Hindus. These monuments, however, have not been examined with anything like the care requisite for the solution of a problem like this, and till it is done we must rest content with our ignorance.[40] In the north we have been somewhat more fortunate, and enough is now known to make it clear that, so soon as the inquirers can consent to put aside personal jealousies, and apply themselves earnestly to the task, we may know enough to make the general outline at least tolerably clear. When I first published my work on ‘Tree and Serpent Worship,’ seven years ago, no one suspected, at least no one had hinted in type, that such a form of religion existed in Bengal. Since that time, however, so much has been written on the subject, and proof on proof has accumulated with such rapidity, that few will now be bold enough to deny that Trees were worshipped in India in the earliest times, and that a Naga people did exist, especially in the north-west, who had a strange veneration for snakes. It may be too bold a generalisation to assert, at present, that no people became Buddhists who had not previously been serpent worshippers, but it certainly is nearer the truth than at first sight appears. It is, at all events, quite certain that underlying Buddhism we everywhere find evidence of a stratum of Tree and Serpent Worship. Sometimes it may be repressed and obscured, but at others it crops up again, and, to a certain extent, the worship of the Tree and the Serpent, at some times and in certain places, almost supersedes that of the founder of the religion himself.