"It is agreed among all the pundits, that Rama, their seventh incarnate divinity, appeared as king of Ayodhya, in the interval between the silver and the brazen ages; and if we suppose him to have

begun his reign at the very beginning of that interval, still 3300 years of the Gods, or 1188000 lunar years of mortals, will remain in the silver age, during which the fifty-five princes, between Vaivaswata and Rama, must have governed the world. But reckoning thirty years for a generation, which is rather too much for a long succession of eldest sons, as they are said to have been, we cannot by the course of nature, extend the second age of the Hindus beyond 1650 solar years. If we suppose them not to have been eldest sons, and even to have lived longer than modern princes in a dissolute age, we shall find only a period of 2000 years and if we remove the difficulty by admitting miracles*, we must cease to reason, and may as well believe at once whatever the Brahmans choose to tell us."

"In the Lunar pedigree, we meet with another absurdity, equally fatal to the credit of the system of the Hindus. As far as the twenty-second degree of descent from Vaivaswata, the synchronism of the two families appears tolerably regular; except that the children of the Moon were not all eldest sons; for king Yayati appointed the youngest of his five sons to succeed him in India, and allotted inferior kingdoms to the other four, who had of

Does this author mean to deny the existence of miracles? may not the argument be retorted by the Hindus?

fended him: part of the Dacshin, or the south, to Yadu, the ancestor of Crishnu; the north to Anu; the east to Druhya; and the west to Turvasu, from whom the pundits believe, or pretend to believe, in compliment to our nation, that we are descended*. But of the subsequent degrees in the Lunar line they know so little, that, unable to supply a considerable interval between Bharat and Vitatha, whom they call his son and successor, they are under a necessity of asserting, that the great ancestor of Yudhishthir actually reigned 27000 years, a fable of the same class with that of his wonderful birth, which is the subject of a beautiful Indian drama. Now, if we suppose his life to have lasted no longer than that of other mortals, and admit Vitatha and the rest to have been his regular successors, we shall fall into another absurdity; for then, if the generations in both lines. were nearly equal, as they would naturally have been, we shall find Yudhishthir, who reigned confessedly at the close of the brazen age, nine gene

*The Hindus believe with the Zabii, that the second Menu was the Egyptian Agathodæmon, the ancestor of Buddha, the son of Máya. They likewise believe that Asclepiades, although under another name, was appointed to rule over the fourth part of the world namely, the West, which after the deluge was termed Europe. The pundits believed that Turvasu ruled over that part of the world now occupied by Europeans; not that the postdiluvian Europeans descended from that prince.

rations older than Rama, before whose birth the silver age is allowed to have ended.* After the name of Bharat, therefore, I have set an asterisk, to denote a considerable chasm in the Indian history, and have inserted between brackets, as out of their places, his twenty-four successors, who reigned, if at all, in the following age, immediately before the war of the Mahabharat. The fourth Avatar, which is placed in the interval between the first and second ages, and the fifth, which soon followed it, appear to be moral fables, grounded on historical facts. The fourth was the punishment of an impious monarch by the Deity himself, bursting from a marble column, in the shape of a lion; and the fifth was the humiliation of an arrogant prince, by so contemptible an agent as a mendicant dwarf. After these, and immediately before Buddha, come three great warriors, all named Rama; but it may justly be made a question, whether they are not three representations of one person, or three different ways of relating the same history: the first and second Ramas are said to have been contemporary; but whether all, or

*If the silver age is allowed to have ended before the birth of Rama, how came this author to place his reign, as king of Ayodhya during that age? The fact is, Rama became a ruler during the second age, and the pundits all agree, that his reign did not commence until after the second age was concluded.