whose religious ideas had probably much in common with those of Gautama himself. Mr. Fergusson refers to the fact that a king of the Naga race was reigning in Magadha when Buddha was born in 623 B.C.; and he adds that the dissemination of his religion “is wholly due to the accident of its having been adopted by the low caste kings of Magadha, and to its having been elevated by one of them to the rank of the religion of the state.” It would appear, indeed, that according to a Hindu legend, Gautama himself had a serpent lineage. The “serpent-science” of Hindu legend has a curious parallel in Phœnician mythology. The invention of the Phœnician written character is referred to the god Taaut or Thoth, whose snake-symbol bears his name Têt, and is used to represent the ninth letter of the alphabet (_teta_), which in the oldest Phœnician character has the form of the snake curling itself up. Philo thus explains the form of the letter _theta_, and that the god from whom it took its name was designated by the Egyptians as a snake curled up, with its head turned inwards. Philo adds that the letters of the Phœnician alphabet “are those formed by means of serpents; afterwards, when they built temples, they assigned them a place in the adytums, instituted various ceremonies and solemnities in honour of them, and adored them as the supreme gods, the rulers of the universe.” Bunsen thinks the sense of this passage is “that the forms and movements of serpents were employed in the invention of the oldest letters, which represent the gods.” He says, however, that “the alphabet does not tally at all with the Phœnician names,” and the explanation given by Philo, although curious as showing the ideas anciently associated with the serpent, is reliable only so far as it confirms the connection between that animal and the inventor of the written characters. According to another tradition, the ancient theology of Egypt was said to have been given by the Agatho-dæmon, who was the benefactor of all mankind.