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of it which actually take place in certain dif tricts of that country, are the principal source of the great powers with which fuperftition has armed this imaginary divinity; for, Indra is not always the object of delight and love to the adoring Hindoo. If fometimes he descend, like the æthereal Jove of Greece, in genial fhowers, he is at other times attended by a ghaftly train of deadly vapours and peftilential blafts. Those who live on the coaft, and feel the foothing influence of air in agitation in the cool and balmy breeze that blows every morning from off the ocean upon the land, have great reason to exult in the bleffings beftowed by Indra; while thofe again cannot avoid trembling at his power, who breathe the burning atmosphere, and contend with the drifted fands, of the fcorched plains of Berar. The cerulean fields, that conftitute the domains of the Indian Divefpiter, are in truth the scene of their wildeft and, I may add, their most gloomy mythology: they are fraught with objects which excite alternate transport and difmay. The comet portentously blazing through a vast tract of illumined æther filled them with dire and inexpreffible alarms; with fuperftitious reverence they'

marked

marked the corufcations of the Aurora Borealis, or obferved the boding meteor glide down the nocturnal heavens; and they heard the awful report made by its explosion, amidft the dead filence of night, with unutterable terror.

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It is fcarcely poffible, therefore, to conceive a nation, who thus accurately observed the phænomena of the heavens; for, their mytho logical legends concerning Indra and his stormy prime minifter are merely allufions to those phænomena; a nation, who from them drew prefages the most important and interesting, to have been ignorant of the nature and properties of an element to which they had fo minutely attended, and confequently the principles of PNEUMATIC SCIENCE muft in a degree have been known to them. They must have known that air, not less than water and fire, ferved to form, as it were, the grand cement and univerfal bond of nature, equally pervading and cherishing the whole animal and vegetable world. On the lofty mountains, whofe fummits the firft race of Indians, efcaped from the deluge, chofe for their refidence, Nature, the great chemift, as well as the fun's powerful beam, acting more immedi

ately

ately upon the atmosphere of equatorial regions, would foon teach them its wonderful quality of rarefaction and expansion; and its density and resistless power would not fail to be discovered at the period of the monsoons, those vast and ponderous columns of air in motion, which with irresistible violence at one time ravaged the fhores of the Peninsula, breaking down the strongest trees, and, like the hurricanes of the western world, sweeping every object before them; and which at others dispersed over the deep the rich cargoes of their various commerce, the produce of the filkworm, and the jewels of Golconda. Hence, perturbed and terrified, this fuperftitious race beheld the aërial phænomena with reverential horror every cloud has its directing dæmon, and every gale its attendant dewtah. Superstition hears fome perturbed fpirit of the vasty deep raging in the midnight storm, and fees the angry deity launching over the Gauts the terrific and irresistible shaft of the tropical lightning.

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How far the first race of Indians might carry into experiment and practise the philofophical observations thus made by them on the operations of nature in that various clime,

it is impoffible to decide, till their philosophi cal books fhall have been more accurately examined; but, that they were no strangers to the generative and invigorating influence of air, acting forcibly upon other elementary matter, and particularly on the watery element, is indubitably evident, from the uni/ verfal traditionary doctrine which runs through all the cofmogonies of the East, that, at the beginning of time, the wind of God, or a wind from God, (for, by this perverted title they generally denominate the Пvsuμa Ayion of Scripture,) violently agitated the wa ters of the chaos, and rendered them prolific. We have shown before, that the cofmogony of the Phoenicians affirms the principle of the universe to have been a dark wind, turbulent and boundless; and, in the latter part of that description, we read, that the air fhining with athereal light, by its fiery influence on the fea and earth, winds were begotten, and clouds, and great defluxions of the heavenly wa

ters.

The ancient philofophers of India, like the ftoics of Greece, who in all probability borrowed the doctrine from the Indian fchools, which many of them vifited, or obtained them

through

through the channel of Egypt, imagined a fifth element, formed of the more refined particles of igneous air, which they call the AKASS; that pure, tranfparent, luminous, æther, in which the planets and other celestial bodies roll. This fubtile fpirit, this penetrating fluid, they conceive to pervade all bodies, and to be the great principle of vitality and bond of all existence. They talk concerning it with tranfport; but, amidst their raptures, totally different from the atheistical fabricators of the Phoenician cofmogony, their greatest and most venerated philofophers of the VEDANTA school never forget to advert to the SUPREME CREATIVE SPIRIT of the universe from which it emaned, his auguft representative and powerful agent in the animation and direc tion of boundless worlds.

A knowledge of pneumatic science was also, in a great degree, neceffary to the carrying on many of the mechanic arts for which the Indians were fo famous; and if they were fo far advanced in chemistry, in the earliest ages, as there is every reason to suppose they were, they must have required, for their furnaces, machines for collecting, compreffing, and difcharging, the current of air, in a body forci

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