of Berosus could not be maintained, as the solar character of Oannes is undoubted; but this identification rests on a very slender base, and leads to no better understanding either of Anu or of Oannes. With the worship of the Clouds is naturally united that of the Rain, which we find deified by many primitive nations. We find this, for instance, in the Akra people of the Gold Coast of West Africa. They express the question ‘Will it rain?’ by the words ‘Will God come?’[591] Among the heathen of the tribe of Baghirmi in Central Africa, with whom Dr. Nachtigall, lately returned from that region, has made us acquainted, the name Deity is identical with the designation of Storm.[592] In the language of the Wamasai in Eastern Africa the feminine noun Aï (with the article Engaï) has the two significations God and Rain.[593] This deification of rain and storm is moreover identical with Serpent-worship, wherever the latter occurs. For the adoration of the Serpent and Dragon is derived from the mythical conception which regarded rain as a ‘fluid serpent’ (see supra, p. 186); and wherever it is met with at a more advanced stage of civilisation it is a residuum from that stage at which men knew no more beneficent power than the dark overcast sky, the rain, the dragon that opposes the sun Bêl. The Egyptian and Indian theological ideas of the serpent are examples of such residua of the ancient nomadic views. Where a solar worship has grown up, either the old conception of the beneficent serpent continues to exist alongside of the new views, without being understood or harmonised with these, or else the defeat of the Serpent by the victory of the Sun becomes a feature of the new religion, and the Serpent appears as a hostile figure. So, for instance, in Persia and elsewhere. Max Müller actually opposes the very method of Comparative Mythology which he himself introduced and maintained so brilliantly, when he declares ‘There is an Aryan, there is a Semitic, there is a Turanian, there is an African serpent, and who but an evolutionist would dare to say that all these conceptions came from one and the same original source, that they are all held together by one traditional chain?’[594] No doubt this single chain of tradition is a perfectly unscientific assumption, but none the less does the same original source serve as origin of serpent-worship everywhere, namely, the old mythical conception; and the varieties of view that we meet are to be classified not according to ethnological races, but by historical stages of civilisation. Certainly we shall at length have to cease seeking a motive for the worship of the Serpent where the symbolical school have persistently sought it even to the most recent times—in the ‘Conception of the deep wisdom of the serpent and of the mystic powers which are said to belong to its nature.’ The Serpent-worship as a form of religion is a further development of the mythical expressions which describe the