llowers of Zoroaster, are to be found in Guzeratee, the present
dialect of the Indian Parsees. A full exposition of the
Zoroastrian religion, with satisfactory proofs of its antiquity
and documentary genuineness, is presented in the Preliminary
Discourse and Notes to the Dabistan. This curious and entertaining
work, a fund of strange and valuable lore, is an historico
critical view of the principal religions of the world, especially
of the Oriental sects, schools, and manners. It was composed in
Persian, apparently by Mohsan Fani, about the year 1645. An
English translation, with elaborate explanatory matter, by David
Shea and Anthony Troyer, was published at London and at Paris in
1843.7

In these records there are obscurities, incongruities, and chasms,
as might naturally be anticipated, admitting them to be strictly
what they would pass for. These faults may be accounted for in
several ways. First, in a rude stage of philosophical culture,
incompleteness of theory, inconsistent conceptions in different
parts of a system, are not unusual, but are rather to be expected,
and are slow to become troublesome to its adherents. Secondly,
distinct contemporary thinkers or sects may give expression to
their various views in literary productions of the same date and
possessing a balanced authority. Or, thirdly, the heterogeneous
conceptions in some particulars met with in these scriptures may
be a result of the fact that the collection contains writings of
distinct ages, when the same problems had been differently
approached and had given birth to opposing or divergent
speculations. The later works of course cannot have the authority
of the earlier in deciding questions of ancient belief: they are
to be taken rather as commentaries, interpreting and carrying out
in detail many points that lie only in obscure hints and allusions
in the primary documents. But it is a significant fact that, in
the generic germs of doctrine and custom, in the essential
outlines of substance, in rhetorical imagery, in practical morals,
the statements of all these books are alike: they only vary in
subordinate matters and in degrees of fulness.

The charge has repeatedly been urged that the materials of the
more recent of the Parsee Scriptures the Desatir and the
Bundehesh were drawn from Christian and Mohammedan sources. No
evidence of value for sustaining such assertions has been adduced.
Under the circumstances, scarcely any motive for such an