This example, of the bird, which I have given in some detail, will illustrate the cult of an animal form. It by no means stands alone in its universality. Perhaps even more striking is the so-called “serpent-worship,” which has occupied the attention of so many writers. The adoration of the serpent-symbol is wonderfully wide-spread. Scarcely a native tribe can be named in regions where this animal is known, which does not pay it some sort of reverence. Some writers have traced the sentiment back to the anthropoid progenitor of man, supposed to dwell in tropical forests abounding in venomous snakes. But into this extensive question I cannot enter. The symbolic value of most animal deities can be traced to some peculiar trait of the species. Thus the lizard, very prominent in the religions of Polynesia, Australia, and South Africa, derived its significance from the nocturnal habits of some species and the diurnal habits of others.[197] In America, the frog was the symbol of water, over a vast area; and that it has precisely the same meaning in Australia, will cause no astonishment when we recall its amphibious nature. The fish, as the emblem of life, familiar in Christian symbolism, dates back to earliest Chaldean times, when Oannes, a form of the god Êa, appeared as half fish and half man, and is a parallel of the fish-god who sows the seed of man in the flood myths of both the Brahmans and the Mexicans. It is but another expression of the recognition of water as the source or condition of life. The totemic animals, or “eponymous ancestors,” of the clans or gentes among the American Indians, are not to be taken literally. They were not understood as animals of the sort we see to-day, but as mythical, ancient beings, of supernatural attributes, who clothed themselves in those forms for their own purposes. _7. Man._—That when the brute was at times invested with the aureole of the Divine, man himself should at times partake of its glory, need be expected. But here let an important distinction be drawn. Never _as man_ was he clothed in the attributes of Deity, but just in so far as he was deemed to be _more than man_. The Latin saying, _deus homini deus_, never was true anywhere in its literal sense. Anthropism never existed in any religion. Man or the likeness of man was never worshipped by reason of any human attribute, but solely for those believed to be more than human, superhuman. The tribes of Polynesia did adore their chieftains; the ancient Egyptians and many another people did pay their rulers divine honour, and rank them among the gods; but always because they considered them partakers of the divine nature, sharers in that which is ever beyond mere humanity.[198]