dragon train alone seems to be
connected with the Scriptural history.[5]

[Footnote 5: The chart alluded to is one of the _jac-similes_ of an
ancient planisphere, engraved in bronze about the end of the 15th
century, and called the Borgian Table, from its possessor, Cardinal
Stephen Borgia, and preserved in his museum at Veletri.]

Other heathen nations, whose creeds could not have directly contributed
to the system of demonology, because their manners and even their very
existence was unknown when it was adopted, were nevertheless involved,
so soon as Europeans became acquainted with them, in the same charge of
witchcraft and worship of demons brought by the Christians of the Middle
Ages against the heathens of northern Europe and the Mahommedans of the
East. We learn from the information of a Portuguese voyager that even
the native Christians (called those of St. Thomas), whom the discoverers
found in India when they first arrived there, fell under suspicion of
diabolical practices. It was almost in vain that the priests of one of
their chapels produced to the Portuguese officers and soldiers a holy
image, and called on them, as good Christians, to adore the Blessed
Virgin. The sculptor had been so little acquainted with his art, and the
hideous form which he had produced resembled an inhabitant of the
infernal regions so much more than Our Lady of Grace, that one of the
European officers, while, like his companions, he dropped on his knees,
added the loud protest, that if the image represented the Devil, he paid
his homage to the Holy Virgin.

In South America the Spaniards justified the unrelenting cruelties
exercised on the unhappy natives by reiterating, in all their accounts
of the countries which they discovered and conquered, that the Indians,
in their idol worship, were favoured by the demons with a direct
intercourse, and that their priests inculcated doctrines and rites the
foulest and most abhorrent to Christian ears. The great snake-god of
Mexico, and other idols worshipped with human sacrifices and bathed in
the gore of their prisoners, gave but too much probability to this
accusation; and if the images themselves were not actually tenanted by
evil spirits, the worship which the Mexicans paid to them was founded
upon such deadly cruelty and dark superstition as might easily be
believed to have been breathed into mortals by the agency of hell.

Even in North America, the first settlers in New England a