s the principal
seaport of Guzerat.--_Ed._

[468] Porus was king of part of the Punjaub, and was conquered by
Alexander the Great.--_Ed._

[469] _Narsinga._--The laws of Narsing oblige the women to throw
themselves into the funeral pile, to be burnt with their deceased
husbands. An infallible secret to prevent the desire of
widowhood.--CASTERA from Barros, Dec. 4.

[470] The Canarese, who inhabit Canara, on the west coast of
India.--_Ed._

[471] Medina, a city of Arabia, famous as being the burial-place of
Mohammed, and hence esteemed sacred.--_Ed._

[472] According to tradition, Perimal, a sovereign of India, embraced
Islamism about 800 years before GAMA'S voyage, divided his dominions
into different kingdoms, and ended his days as a hermit at Mecca.--_Ed._

[473] _i.e._ pariahs, outcasts.

[474] _Brahma their founder as a god they boast._--Antiquity has talked
much, but knew little with certainty of the Brahmins, and their
philosophy. Porphyry and others esteem them the same as the
Gymnosophists of the Greeks, and divide them into several sects, the
Samanaei, the Germanes, the Pramnae, the Gymnetae, etc. Brahma is the head
of the Hindu triad which consists of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva.--_Ed._

[475] Almost innumerable, and sometimes as whimsically absurd as the
"Arabian Nights' Entertainments," are the holy legends of India. The
accounts of the god Brahma, or Brimha, are more various than those of
any fable in the Grecian mythology. According to Father Bohours, in his
life of Xavier, the Brahmins hold, that the Great God having a desire to
become visible, became man. In this state he produced three sons, Mayso,
Visnu, and Brahma; the first, born of his mouth, the second, of his
breast, the third, of his belly. Being about to return to his
invisibility, he assigned various departments to his three sons. To
Brahma he gave the third heaven, with the superintendence of the rites
of religion. Brahma having a desire for children, begat the Brahmins,
who are the priests of India, and who are believed by the other tribes
to be a race of demi-gods, who have the blood of heaven running in their
veins. Other accounts say, that Brahma produced the priests from his
head, the more ignoble tribes from his breast, thighs, and feet.

According to the learned Kircher's account of the theology of the
Brahmins, the sole and supreme god Vishnu, formed the secondary god
Brahma, out of a flower that floated on the surface of the gr