the god by the Vaishnava school, worshippers of Vishnu, a cult which seems to have been organized after the downfall of Buddhism. The earliest reference I can quote to it is from the Mahābhārata, which seems to have assumed something like its present form in or after the 5th century B.C. The words used (Mahabharata, trans. Kisari Mohan Ganjali, vol. iv., p. 128), are "the stony image of Vishnu, with gold within.""
It will be seen at once that the description here given of the ammonite of Vishnu is in one respect strikingly reminiscent of the description of Pliny, i.e. in regard to the observation made by him as to its "golden colour."
It only remains to consider whether there is any recognition from Indian sources of the coiled snake idea which has been familiar for so long a period in England and other parts of Western Europe. I think on the whole that we can say there is, for Mr. Crooke kindly writes to me: —
"The story told is that the fossil was Vishnu through which the Destroyer, as a worm, wound his way. It appears to me possible (1) that the word worm may be here used in its old English double sense of worm or serpent, and (2) that Siva, if anything, represents the worm and not Vishnu, who represents the stone."
Another of the widely-spread beliefs of our peasantry is the belief that the prehistoric stone implements found in all parts of the country, generally speaking, are "thunderbolts": indeed the best-known stone superstition is that the celt was a thunderbolt. Johnson rather uncritically remarks,—"That the various kinds of fossil belemnites, as well as the rounded concretions of iron pyrites from the Lower Chalk are also called thunderbolts, matters little. Gods, fairies, witches, and other like beings, have divers weapons for afflicting the ignorant peasant, bowed low in his fear."[1] It really matters a good deal! But I shall first take the various kinds in succession.
- ↑ Folk-Memory, p. 125.
