requently interchangeable' ('List
of Indigenous Trees' in _Mathura, A. District Memoir_, 3rd ed.,
Allahabad, 1883, p. 422). Sundry leguminous trees are used in
Dasahara ceremonies in the different parts of India, under varying
local names.

9. _Credo quia impossibile_.

10. This comparison is not a happy one. The elements in some of the
Hindoo myths specially repulsive to European taste are their
monstrosity, their inartistic and hideous exaggeration, their
accumulation of sanguinary horrors, and their childish triviality.
Few of the classical myths exhibit these characteristics. The vanity
or policy of Tiberius and Alexander in believing themselves to be, or
wishing to be believed, divine, has nothing in common with the
grotesque imagination of Puranic Hinduism.

11. The roots of Hinduism are so deeply fixed in a thick soil of
custom and inherited sentiment, the growth of thousands of years,
that English education has less effect than might be expected in
loosening the bonds of beliefs which seem to every one but a Hindoo
the merest superstition. Hindoos who can read English with fluency,
and write it with accuracy, are often extremely devout, and Hindoo
devoutness must ever appear to an outsider, even to a European as
sympathetic as the author, to be no better than superstition. A
Hindoo able to read English with ease has at his command all the rich
stores of the knowledge of the West, but very often does not care to
taste them. Enmeshed in a web of ritual and belief inseparable from
himself, he remains as much as ever a Hindoo, and uses his skill in
English merely as an article of professional equipment. 'Good works
of history and fiction' do not interest him, and he usually fails to
digest and assimilate the physical or biological science administered
to him at school or college. In fact, he does not believe it. The
monstrous legends of the Puranas continue to be for his mind the
realities; while the truths of science are to him phantoms, shadowy
and unsubstantial, the outlandish notions of alien and casteless
unbelievers. These observations, of course, are not universally true,
and a few Hindoos, growing in number, are able to heartily accept and
thoroughly assimilate the facts of history and the results of
inductive science. But such Hindoos are few, and it may well be
doubted if it is possible for a man really to believe the amount of
history and science known to an ordinary English schoolboy, and still
be a