ng to early faith, the most prolific source of the destruction of
nature, and yet the most active in its revival.

There are in Brittany vast lines of massy Druidic stones, piled
sometimes for leagues in regular order, in such a manner as to represent
colossal serpents. Those who will consult the French _Dracontia_ will be
astonished at the labor expended on these strange temples. Squier has
shown that the earth-works of the West represent precisely the same
symbol. Mexico and South America abound, like Europe and the East, in
serpent emblems; they twine around the gods; they are gods themselves;
they destroy as Typhon, and give life in the hands of Esculapius.

In the United States, as in Europe and in the East, there are found in
steep places, by difficult paths, always near the banks of streams,
narrow, much-worn passages in rocks, through which one person[J] can
barely squeeze, and which were evidently not intended for ordinary
travel. The passing through these places was enjoined on religious
votaries, as indicating respect for the great principle of regeneration.
The peasants of Europe, here and there, at the present day, continue to
pass through these rock or cave doors, 'for luck.' It was usual, after
the transition, whether into a cave, where mysteries, feasts, and orgies
were held, significant of 'the revival,' or merely through a narrow
way,--to bathe in the invariably neighboring river; the serpent-river or
water which drowns organic life, yet without which it dies.

In England, at a comparatively recent period, and even yet occasionally
in Scandinavia, the peasantry plighted their troth by passing their
hands through the hole in the 'Odin-stones,' and clasping them. Beads
and wedding rings and 'fairy-stones,' or those found with holes in them,
were all linked to the same faith which rendered sacred every
resemblance to the 'passing through.' The graves of both North and
South America contain abundant evidence of the sacredness in which the
same objects were held. I have a singularly-shaped soapstone ornament,
taken from an Indian grave, whose perforation indicates the
'fairy-stone.' The religious legends of Mexico and of Peru are too
identical with many of the Old World to be passed over as coincidences;
the gold images of Chiriqui, with their Baal bell-ringing figures, and
serpent-girt, pot-bellied phallic idols, are too strikingly like those
of _Old_ Ireland and of the East not to suggest some far-away c