raised and hair on his body, but with human feet and hands. Guelelé was succeeded on the throne by his son Behanzin, who was surnamed the Shark, and his effigy portrays him standing upright with the head and body of a fish, the fins and scales being carefully represented, while his arms and legs are those of a man.(238) Again, a king of Benin was called Panther, and a bronze statue of him, now in the Anthropological Museum at Berlin, represents him with a panther’s whiskers.(239) Such portraits furnish an exact parallel to what I conceive to be the true story of the Minotaur. On the Gold Coast of Africa a powerful ruler is commonly addressed as “O Elephant!” or “O Lion!” and one of the titles of the king of Ashantee, mentioned at great ceremonies, is _borri_, the name of a venomous snake.(240) It has been argued that King David belonged to a serpent family, and that the brazen serpent, which down to the time of Hezekiah was worshipped with fumes of burning incense,(241) represented the old sacred animal of his house.(242) In Europe the bull, the serpent, and the wolf would naturally be on the list of royal beasts. (M65) If the king’s soul was believed to pass at death into the sacred animal, a custom might arise of keeping live creatures of the species in captivity and revering them as the souls of dead rulers. This would explain the Athenian practice of keeping a sacred serpent on the Acropolis and feeding it with honey cakes; for the serpent was identified with Erichthonius or Erechtheus, one of the ancient kings of Athens, of whose palace some vestiges have been discovered in recent times. The creature was supposed to guard the citadel. During the Persian invasion a report that the serpent had left its honey-cake untasted was one of the strongest reasons which induced the people to abandon Athens to the enemy; they thought that the holy reptile had forsaken the city.(243) Again, Cecrops, the first king of Athens, is said to have been half-serpent and half-man;(244) in art he is represented as a man from the waist upwards, while the lower part of his body consists of the coils of a serpent.(245) It has been suggested that like Erechtheus he was identical with the serpent on the Acropolis.(246) Once more, we are told that Cychreus gained the kingdom of Salamis by slaying a snake which ravaged the island,(247) but that after his death he, like Cadmus, appeared in the form of the reptile.(248) Some said that he was a man who received the name of Snake on account of his cruelty.(249) Such tales may preserve reminiscences of kings who assumed the style of serpents in their lifetime and were believed to transmigrate into serpents after death. Like the dragons of Thebes and Delphi, the Athenian serpent appears to have been conceived as a creature of the waters; for the serpent-man Erechtheus was identified with the water-god Poseidon,(250) and in his temple, the Erechtheum, where