The veneration of the serpent must have been of very early origin to occupy so strong a hold over the Chinese, whose spoken language, according to M. Terrien de Lacouperie, forms a link between the Accadian and the Ugro-Finnish divisions of the Ural-Altaic languages. The art of metallurgy was practised by the peoples belonging to both these divisions, and yet, according to M. Lenormant, it was not known to the early Chinese. We must thus suppose that the latter left the common home before the invention of metallurgy, and, therefore, that they represent a very early condition of the stock from which the Turanian peoples sprang. We seem, indeed, to be carried back to the very earliest period of the legendary history of the Cainite race, and possibly to that of the legendary ancestor of the race. According to the tradition preserved in Genesis, there was a peculiar association between Adam and the serpent. This animal is there the tempter Satan, but according to another view Adam, or rather Ad, who was apparently the traditional ancestor of a portion at least of the old Turanian stock, was himself the serpent. A rabbinical tradition makes Cain the son, not of Adam, but of the serpent-spirit Asmodeus. The name Eve is connected with an Arabic root which means both “life” and “a serpent,” and if Eve was the serpent mother, Ad must have been the serpent father of the race. There is reason for believing that Adam was the legendary ancestor of the Cainites, as distinguished from the descendants of Seth. The name Adam, no doubt, signifies in the Semitic languages “the man,” but it has been pointed out that the name borne by the son of Seth, and therefore the ancestor of Noah, that is Enoch, is in Hebrew the exact synonym of Adam, and also signifies “the man.” There is, moreover, almost an exact parallel between the descendants of Adam, through Cain on the one hand, and those of Seth through Enoch on the other, and each line is terminated by three heads of races, that of the Cainites by the sons of Lamekh and that of the Enocides by the grandsons of Lamekh. In the latter there is the insertion of one additional generation, that of Noah, between Lamekh and the division of the family into three branches. This is, however, capable of explanation. M. Lenormant shows, by a comparison of the various legends referring to the primitive age of mankind, that the number 7 or 10 was used by all the ancient nations as a round number for the antediluvian ancestors of the race. Tradition seemed to float between these two numbers until the influence of the Chaldæo-Babylonians caused the number 10, which is that of the generations of the Sethites, to dominate over the number 7, that of the Cainites. It is to that influence we would ascribe the existence among the descendants of Seth of the legendary ancestor of the three Caucasian races. The Chaldean Noah was Khasisatra, whose vessel was saved during the Flood by the god Héa. This god himself was, however,