“The earliest dates of specific Buddhism are of the same age as the earliest dates of specific Brahminism.

“Clemens of Alexandria mentions Buddhist pyramids, the Buddhist habit of depositing certain bones in them, the Buddhist practice of foretelling events, the Buddhist practice of continence, the Buddhist Semnai or holy virgins.  This, however, may he but so much asceticism.  He mentions this and more.  He supplies the name Bouta; Bouta being honored as a god.

“From Cyril of Jerusalem we learn that Samnaism was, more or less, Manichaean,—­Manichaeanism being, more or less, Samanist.  Terebinthus, the preceptor of Manes, took the name Baudas.  In Epiphanius, Terebinthus is the pupil of Scythianus.

“Suidas makes Terebinthus a pupil of Baudda, who pretended to be the son of a virgin.  And here we may stop to remark, that the Mongol Tshingiz-Khan is said to be virgin-born; that, word for word, Scythianus is Sak; that Sakya Muni (compare it with Manes) is a name of Buddha.

“Be this as it may, there was, before A.D. 300,—­

  “1.  Action and reaction between Buddhism
  and Christianity.

  “2.  Buddhist buildings.

  “3.  The same cultus in both Bactria and
  India.

  “Whether this constitute Buddhism is another
  question.”—­Vol. ii. p. 317.

And more of an equally attractive and comprehensible character.

We assure the reader that these extracts are but feeble exponents of the peculiar power of Mr. Latham’s works,—­a power of unmitigated dulness.  What his views are on the great questions of the science—­the origin of races, the migrations, the crossings of varieties, and the like—­no mortal can remember, who has penetrated the labyrinth of his researches.

An author of a very different kind is Professor Waiz, whose work on Anthropology has just reached this country:  a writer as philosophic as Mr. Latham is disconnected; as pleasing and natural in style as the other is affected; as simply open to the true and good in all customs or superstitions of barbarous peoples as the Englishman is contemptuous of everything not modern and European.  Waiz seems to us the most careful and truly scientific author in the field of Ethnology whom we have had since Prichard, and with the wider scope which belongs to the intellectual German.

The bane of this science, as every one knows, has been its theorizing, and its want of careful inductive reasoning from facts.  The classifications in it have been endless, varying almost with the fancies of each new student; while every prominent follower of it has had some pet hypothesis, to which he desired to suit his facts.  Whether the a priori theory were of modern miraculous origin or of gradual development, of unity or of diversity of parentage, of permanent and absolute divisions of races or of a community of blood, it has equally forced the author to twist his facts.