The elephant was not among the animals worshiped by them. They do not seem to have been much acquainted with it. But the imprint of the red hand, so commonly seen on the walls of the temples of Mayax and India, has never been observed in the temples of Egypt; neither did the Egyptian women carry their children astride on their hip, as do still those of India and Yucatan, although many other customs were common to the people of these countries. It is probable that the colonists from the "Lands of the West" who settled in the valley of the Nile, replaced the worship of the mastodon, which did not exist in the country, by that of the bull, the largest and most useful of their domestic animals; and that this was the origin of their veneration for the bull Apis, as those who were initiated into the mysteries of Osiris well knew, being told that Apis ought to be regarded as a fair and beautiful image of their soul. From the remotest antiquity the serpent was held by every people in the greatest veneration as the embodiment of divine wisdom. We have already said that Eusebius asserts that the Egyptians figured emblematically _Kneph_, the Creator, as a serpent; and that the Maya learned priests represented the engendered, the ancestor of all beings, in the sculptures, protected within the coils of the serpent. Mr. Stanyland Wake, in his book on the origin of the serpent worship writes: "the student of mythology knows that certain ideas were associated by the people of antiquity with the serpent, and that it was the favorite symbol of peculiar deities; but why that animal rather than any other was chosen for that purpose is yet uncertain." The late Mr. James Fergusson in his work on "Serpent and Tree Worship," a work so full of erudition and interesting researches, whilst he conclusively shows that these worships were common to all civilized and half civilized nations of antiquity, fails to indicate the country where they originated. All authors who have written on the subject, admit that their origin is still an impenetrable mystery; although they agree that they are so intimately connected as to make it impossible not to believe it must have been the same. The limited scope of this book does not allow me to give the matter all the space it deserves. I will therefore content myself, with bringing forth such facts as will conclusively show, at least to unprejudiced minds, that the serpent and tree worship indeed originated on this "Western continent," and from the same cause; "the love of the country," from the _amor-patriæ_, still so firmly rooted in the heart of the aborigines, that it is difficult to induce them to leave the spot where they are born, even to better their condition. Everywhere on the Eastern continents serpent worship is connected with mythological narratives, metaphysical speculations, or astronomical conceptions, far above the intellectual and scientific attainments of the mass of people among whom it prevailed.