irrepressible, apparently basic mode of Indian religious belief and experience, which had never been quite done away by the Vedic Brāhmans.

Important elements in this non-Aryan, pre-Aryan popular religion are serpent and tree worship. Tree worship has been transformed in Buddhism into a pious reverence for the holy trees under which the Buddha and his predecessors in the prehistoric past gained enlightening wisdom. Foremost among the revered trees was the Indian fig (aśvattha : Ficus indica), which sends down from its branches secondary roots to reach the ground and become additional stems. An Indus Valley seal shows an aśattha tree, stylized, with the twin heads of some sort of horned animal springing from its trunk.

The animal on this seal seems to be one-horned; so does the bull in the seal at the lower left. Of course this unicorn effect may be the result of the renditions in profile; nevertheless the possibility of a one-horned beast is not to be excluded; for the unicorn plays a role in Indian lore. Symbolizing the superhuman, semidivine strength gained by chastity, it figured in the popular Indian novels and folktales of the first millennium B.C., which the Buddhists transformed into stories of the earlier lives of the Buddha and which also were incorporated in that encyclopedic epic of Hinduism, the Mahābhārata. The Indian unicorn, perhaps dating from the third millennium B.C., passed into China, where it is known as ki-lin. There it appears among the files of sculptured animals (representing the gifts and tributes brought from foreign lands) that stand on either side of the processional streets leading to the sacred graves of the ancient emperors. Furthermore, during the first centuries of the Christian era the figure entered Egypt, where it was incorporated in a tradition of zoological allegory that played a considerable role in the European Middle Ages. According to the Christian legend, the unicorn cannot be caught by any huntsman, yet it can be tamed by a virgin, a stainless damsel, whom it will approach without fear, since it feels akin to her. It places its head on her lap, innocently falling asleep, and so gives the huntsman his opportunity. In this context the unicorn became for the Christians an emblem of Christ, who had been brought to mankind on the lap of the Virgin, to be slain.

Perhaps the most amazing of the discoveries at Mohenjo-daro is the torso of a dancing male, in stone. The head has been lost; so also have been the arms and the left leg from the knee down-for these were made separately and attached to the trunk with dowels (the holes into which the pins were inserted can be clearly seen). They must have been fashioned separately for a specific purpose, otherwise surely the whole figure would have been carved from a