a_," or one day in the life of Brahma. And
after Brahma has spent his modest day everything is destroyed and his
godship spends an equal period in sleep and rest. Then begins another
Brahmaic day, in which a new succession of Manus spend, with their
progeny, their interminable epochs. And thus one series of epochs
follows another, sandwiched in by equally long spaces of lifeless
darkness. And this goes on until Brahma has completed his divine life
of one hundred years; and then comes the final dissolution. Having
gone on as far as this, there is no reason why the imagination should
rest at this point; and so Vishnu _Purana_, which, of course, is
composed in praise of that god, claims that one day of Vishnu is equal
to the whole life of Brahma!

No one can bring within the range of his thought or imagination one
tithe of the years, divine or human, which are included in this
marvellous chronology. A billion years are but as a day to the Hindu
mind.

And if any one is anxious to know the exact place at which we have
arrived in this chronological maze, the same _Purana_ informs us that
we are five thousand years advanced in the _Kali yuga_ of "_Varaha
karpa_," or the first day in the second half of Brahma's life. And
thus we are supposed to live not far (say a few billion years!) from
the middle of the Hindu chronological system. One may better realize
the length of the system if he remembers that we have yet to spend of
the present _Kali yuga_ alone more than seventy times the whole of the
old Christian chronology from Adam to the present time! And yet, as
compared with the whole system described above, _Kali yuga_ is less
than one day in a thousand years. And that largely measures the
difference between the imagination of the West and the same developed
faculty in the East!

It is quite unnecessary to say that the prehistoric Manus of previous
_yugas_ are absolutely imaginary creatures, since history can tell us
practically nothing about the head of our race, even in the present
Hindu dispensation. There is not a line of history or of reliable
tradition that will enable us to reach farther back than five or six
thousand years in this quest for the origin of our race. There was, of
course, a beginning of human life on earth; and we may, just as we
please, call the progenitor "Manu" or "Adam." But, according to the
Hindu chronological system, six thousand years only carries us just
back into the last _yuga_, and is as