Note 3 — Chapter VI · The Serpent in India.

I cannot think that Miss Buckland has made out a case for crediting nomadic Turanians with being the original metallurgists; though it is not impossible that it may have been a Scythian tribe in Southern India who gave its fame to ‘the gold of Ophir,’ which Max Müller has shown to have been probably an Indian region.3 But that these early jewellers may have had the Serpent as their sign or emblem is highly probable, and in explanation of it there seems little reason to resort to the hypothesis of aid having been given by the Serpent to man in his discovery of metals. Surely the jewelled decoration of the serpent would in itself have been an obvious suggestion of it as the emblem of gems. Where a reptile for some reasons associated with the snake—the toad—had not the like bright spots, the cognate superstition might arise that its jewel is concealed in its head. And, finally, when these reptiles had been connected with gems, the eye of either would easily receive added rays from manifold eye-beams of superstition.