ticular, he assigns the possible æra of 1580 years before the birth of Christ, which is nine years prior to the birth of Moses, and ninety before Moses departed from Egypt with the Israelites.* The first promulgation of the Institutes of Menu, he thinks, was coeval with the first monarchies established in Egypt or Asia; and he remarks a strong resemblance of them, in point of style and grammatical construction, with the VEDAS themselves. I shall not enter farther into the question, but leave every man to form his own opinion on the subject; and proceed to the consideration of what, by the industry of our learned countrymen, has been gleaned from those precious fragments of ancient Indian literature.

*On the Antiquity of the Indian Zodiac, in Asiatic Researches, vol. v. p. 4.

HAVING already, in various parts of these volumes and the Indian history, treated concerning many of the arts and sciences anciently most cultivated in Hindostan; in particular their style of ARCHITECTURF, when discoursing on the pagodas; their skill in SCULpTURE, when examining the figures of Elephanta; having given the entire history of their progress in NAVIGATION, in an express dissertation on that subject, so interesting to Britons, in the Sixth volume of these Antiquities; having, also, in the Commercial Dissertation, considered their MANUFACTURES, and the arts more immediately connected with the beautiful productions of the Indian loom; I conceive my duty to the public, on this point, already in a great degree fulfilled. Their literature and sciences open an immense field for discussion, and materials for the full investigation of them are still among the Indian desiderata. I request, therefore, in a particular manner, the exertion of the reader's candour in perusing the following Dissertation, as the mine of Sanscreet literature has been hitherto but

little explored; though I rejoice to hear there are rising in India many able and willing candidates for that arduous employ.

GENERAL PHYSICS.

In all retrospects upon Indian science and history, it will be observed that an uncommon degree of natural history is blended with it; and, in fact, their mythology is a compound of physics and metaphysics. Extensive, therefore, as have already been our disquisitions on that mythology, occasional references to it can with difficulty be avoided, because, in fact, there is scarcely an art or science which has not its respective numen presiding over it, who is supposed to direct the labours of the artists and the researches of the scholar. Even their theolo gical speculations are, in a great degree, founded upon what they observed passing in the physical world. They saw a direct tendency in nature to dissolution; they therefore fabricated a destroying deity; but, as they also observed a power in nature capable of counteracting that tendency, the same fertile imagination, in consequence, conceived a preserving deity, his enemy and antagonist. Hence, probably, the true source of that rooted enmity immemorially

subsisting between the followers of Veeshnu and Seeva. Every element is, in fact, a personified God; the minerals of the earth, and the corals of the ocean, have their guardian genii; and a subtle spirit pervades and presides over even the humblest tribes of vegetation.

Much as hath already been said on the subject, yet, as it is ever a prominent object in Oriental literary research, I commence my inquiries with renewed investigations and summary retrospect upon their system of

ASTRONOMY.

I have ventured, in various parts of the two works before the public, to give a date to the Brahmin system of Astronomy nearly coeval with the flood; because, in whatever aboriginal country their ancestors were settled, whether in Chaldæa or Iran, that science was absolutely necessary to a race of men who seem, from the earliest times, in a peculiar manner to have devoted themselves to agricultural concerns; to a race not "fleshed in blood," or wandering wild over immense deserts, like the savage tribes of Scythia, but who, from their origin, seem to have associated in affectionate tribes, and been: united by the strictest bonds of domestic inter

course; a race who, for the most part, exist entirely upon the grains and fruits which the cultivated earth abundantly produces, and therefore must of consequence be supposed intimately acquainted with the times and seasons, the result of astronomical observation, most proper for that cultivation. I considered that system as containing a considerable proportion of ante-diluvian astronomy, concerning which; though all that can be advanced must be allowed to be nothing better than ingenious conjecture, yet, since the Indian nation seem always to have adhered so closely together as a people, and since Budha is said to have married ILA, Noah's daughter, it is most probable, that, among them, the remains of the ante-diluvian sciences flourished in a more perfect degree than among the other widely-dispersed branches of his family.

I have also strenuously contended for the existence of an older sphere, containing certain obsolete asterisms at present not to be found in the catalogue of modern constellations, as the Phalana, the wandering moth of night; the Succoth Benoth, or hen and chickens; the Oblation, and others, alluded to by Mr. Costard in his Chaldæan Astronomy.* The devotion of the Indians to this favou

* Costard on the Chaldæan Astronomy, p. 67.