“Their incantations produced a tiger, whose mouth was like a cavern and his voice like thunder among the mountains. They sent him against Sheevah, who with Prakeety was amusing himself in the vale. He smiled at their weakness, and killing the tiger at one blow with his club, he covered himself with his skin. Seeing themselves frustrated in this attempt, the devotees had recourse to another, and sent serpents against him of the most deadly kind; but on approaching him they became harmless, and he twisted them round his neck. They then sent their curses and imprecations against him, but they all recoiled upon themselves. Not yet disheartened by all these disappointments, they collected all their prayers, their penances, their charities, and other good works, the most acceptable sacrifices; and demanding in return only vengeance against Sheevah, they sent a fire to destroy his genital parts. Sheevah, incensed at this attempt, turned the fire with indignation against the human race; and mankind would soon have been destroyed, had not Vishnu, alarmed at the danger, implored him to suspend his wrath. At his entreaties Sheevah relented; but it was ordained that in his temples those parts should be _worshipped_, which the false doctrines had impiously attempted to destroy.” THE CROSS AND ROSARY The key which is still worn with the Priapic hand, as an amulet, by the women of Italy appears to have been an emblem of the equivocal use of the name, as the language of that country implies. Of the same kind, too, appears to have been the cross in the form of the letter _tau_, attached to a circle, which many of the figures of Egyptian deities, both male and female, carry in their left hand; and by the Syrians, Phœnicians and other inhabitants of Asia, representing the planet Venus, worshipped by them as the emblem or image of that goddess. The cross in this form is sometimes observable on coins, and several of them were found in a temple of Serapis, demolished at the general destruction of those edifices by the Emperor Theodosius, and were said by the Christian antiquaries of that time to signify the future life. In solemn sacrifices, all the Lapland idols were marked with it from the blood of the victims; and it occurs on many Runic ornaments found in Sweden and Denmark, which are of an age long anterior to the approach of Christianity to those countries, and probably to its appearance in the world. On some of the early coins of the Phœnicians, we find it attached to a chaplet of beads placed in a circle, so as to form a complete rosary, such as the Lamas of Thibet and China, the Hindus, and the Roman Catholics now tell over while they pray. BEADS