The five, or seven, or one thousand-headed Naga is everywhere present in the temples of the Jains, and pervades the whole religion of the Vaishnavas. In the great act of creation the Naga performs the principal part in the churning of the ocean, and in almost every representation of Vishnu he appears either as supporting and watching over him, or as performing some subsidiary part in the scene. It is, in fact, the Naga that binds together and gives unity to this great group of religions, and it is the presence of the Tree and Serpent worship underlying Buddhism, Jainism, and Vishnuism that seems to prove almost incontestably that there existed a people in the north of India, whether we call them Dasyus, Nishadhas, or by any other name, who were Tree and Serpent worshippers, before they adopted any of the Hindu forms of faith. Nothing can be more antagonistic to the thoughts and feelings of any Aryan race than such forms of worship, and nothing more completely ante-Vedic than its rites. It seems also to have no connection with Saivism.[41] Nor is there any trace of it found among the Dravidians. There appears, in fact, no solution of the riddle possible, but to assume that it was an aboriginal superstition in the north of India, and it was the conversion of the people to whom it belonged that gave rise to that triarchy of religions that have succeeded each other in the north during the last two thousand years. This solution of the difficulty has the further advantage that it steps in at once clearly to explain what philology is only dimly guessing at, though its whole tendency now seems in the same direction. If this view of the mythology be correct, it seems certain that there existed in the north of India, before the arrival of the Aryans, a people whose affinities were all with the Thibetans, Burmese, Siamese, and other trans-Himalayan populations, and who certainly were not Dravidians, though they may have been intimately connected with one division at least of the inhabitants of Ceylon. Both the pre-Aryan races of India belonged, of course, to the Turanian group; but my present impression is, as hinted above, that the Dravidians belong to that branch of the great primordial family of mankind that was developed in Mesopotamia and the countries to the westward of the Caspian. The Dasyus, on the contrary, have all their affinities with those to the eastward of that sea, and the two might consequently be called the Western and the Eastern, or the Scythian and Mongolian Turanians. Such a distinction would certainly represent our present knowledge of the subject better than considering the whole as one family, which is too often the case at the present day.