Siva, after swallowing the poison, as related, went to Himalaya, where he buried himself in the snow. There are many places of worship dedicated to Siva, under that title; but the original one is in the White Island. It is very doubtful if our ancestors knew anything of this churning, and of the deadly poison produced by it, and of a deity swallowing it up. “In that case,” says Major Wilford, “there was no such a place in the White Island. Yet I cannot resist the temptation; and I am inclined to believe it not altogether improbable, but that many of these idle legends originated in the west. If so, there might have been such a place; and it could not have been far from Camalo-dunum. The poison, which Siva drank up, is called in Sanscrit, Cala-cuta, or the black lump or mole, because it remained like a lump in Siva’s throat, which looked like a cuta, a peak, also a lump or mole. Cala-cuta in Welh is y-duman, or the black lump or mole, and this was, according to Ptolemy, the name of a river in England, now called the Blackwater, in Essex. It might have been supposed once, that the black stinking mud of marshes and fens, and more particularly that of the mosses, so baneful to living creatures, was produced in consequence of this churning; probably the emblem used to signify some dreadful convulsion of nature in those parts. That such a thing happened in the western ocean, is attested by tradition: and such was its violence, and the dreadful consequences which attended it, that they could not but suppose that it had destroyed entirely the _Atlantis_ and left nothing in its place but mud. A deity is then introduced, putting a stop to the progress of this black and poisonous substance, ready, according to the Puranas, to overwhelm, not only the White Island, but the whole world also. The serpent Midgard, being at the bottom of the sea, like Ananta, and vomiting torrents of deadly poison, and surrounding the world like Seshanaga, is the subject of several fundamental legends in the mythology of the Goths: but absolutely unknown to the Greeks and Romans. This Cala-cuta, or black lump of poison, stuck in Siva’s throat, like the apple that Adam ate, and occasioned that protuberance, since called Adam’s apple or bit.”[4] [4] See Asiatic Researches, Vol. II. * * * * *