what must necessarily be a very
imperfect manner, you will see that there is good reason to believe that
in the study of science and philosophy the Indian races were much in
advance of the Western nations. The age of science amongst them is very
great; we fail utterly in trying to find its beginning, unless we accept
the tradition which ascribes to Menu, their great lawgiver (who is
supposed to have been Noah), the saving of three out of the four divine
books or Vedas from the deluge. This would carry us back to the
Antediluvian times for the beginning of our investigations; but without
taking any such extreme view of the subject we will find traces of
science clearly marked out for us in the history of the Indian races.

The picture of the Brahmins, drawn by Apuleius in the second century,
shows how little they have changed in historical times. He says:--

"The Indians are a populous nation of vast extent of territory, situated
far from us to the east, near the reflux of the ocean and the rising of
the sun, under the first beams of the stars, and at the extreme verge of
the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews and
the mercantile Nabathaeans; and the flowing robed Aracidae, and the
Ityraeans, poor in crops, and the Arabians, rich in perfumes.

"Now, I do not so much admire the heaps of ivory of the Indians, their
harvests of pepper, their bales of cinnamon, their tempered steel, their
mines of silver, and their golden streams, nor that among them, the
Ganges, the greatest of all rivers,

'Rolls like a monarch on his course, and pours
His eastern waters through a hundred streams,
Mingling with ocean by a hundred mouths,'

"nor that these Indians, though situated at the dawn of day, are yet of
the colour of night, nor that among them, immense dragons fight with
enormous elephants, with parity of danger to their mutual destruction,
for they hold them enwrapped in their slippery folds, so that the
elephants cannot disengage their legs or in any way extricate themselves
from the scaly bonds of the tenacious dragons. They are forced to seek
revenge from the fall of their own bulk and to crush their captors by
the mass of their own bodies.

"There are amongst them various kinds of inhabitants. I will rather
speak of the marvellous things of men than of those of nature.

"There is among them a race who know nothing but to tend cattle, hence
they are called neatherds; there are races clever