h I shall yet complete if
life and strength are spared.

A valued literary friend suggests that the social life described in the
following pages is too much like ours, but why should their daily life
and social customs be greatly different from ours? The Aryan
migrations to India and to Europe were in large masses, of course
taking their social customs, or as the Romans would say, their
household gods, with them.

What wonder, then, that the home as Tacitus describes it in the "Wilds
of Germany" was substantially what Mueller finds from the very
structure of the Sanscrit and European languages it must have been in
Bactria, the common cradle of the Aryan race. There can scarcely be a
doubt that twenty-five hundred years ago the daily life and social
customs in the north of India, which had been under undisputed Aryan
control long enough for the Sanscrit language to spring up, come to
perfection and finally become obsolete, were more like ours than like
those of modern India after the, many--and especially the
Mohammedan--conquests and after centuries of oppression and alien rule.

If a thousand English-speaking Aryans should now be placed on some
distant island, how much would their social customs and even amusements
differ from ours in a hundred years? Only so far as changed climate
and surrounding's compelled.

I give as an introduction an outline of the golden, silver, brazen and
iron ages, as described by the ancient poets and believed in by all
antiquity, as it was in the very depths of the darkness of the iron age
that our great light appeared in Northern India. The very denseness of
the darkness of the age in which he came makes the clearness of the
light more wonderful, and accounts for the joy with which it was
received and the rapidity with which it spread.

Not to enter into the niceties of chronological questions, the mission
of Buddha may be roughly said to have commenced about five hundred
years before the commencement of our era, and with incessant labors and
long and repeated journeys to have lasted forty-five years, when at
about the age of eighty he died, or, as the Buddhists more truthfully
and more beautifully say, entered Nirvana.

HENRY T. NILES.
TOLEDO, January 1, 1894.

* * * * *

Since this work was in the hands of the printer I have read the recent
work of Bishop Copelston, of Columbo, Ceylon, and it was a source of no
small gratification to find him