student of Buddhism in Ceylon, says its sacred books expressly demonstrate that its doctrines had been preached by the twenty-four Buddhas who had lived prior to Gotama, in periods incredibly remote; but that they had entirely disappeared at the time of Gotama’s birth, so that he re-discovered the whole, and revived an extinguished or nearly extinct school of philosophy.—­Notes on Buddhism by the Rev. Mr. GOGERLY, Appendix to LEE’S Translation of Ribeyro, p. 265.]

[Footnote 3:  The celebrated temple of Somnauth was originally a Buddhist foundation, and in the worship of Jaggernath, to whose orgies all ranks are admitted without distinction of caste, there may still be traced an influence of Buddhism, if not a direct Buddhistical origin.  Colonel Sykes is of opinion that the sacred tooth of Buddha was at one time deposited and worshipped in the great Temple of Calinga, now dedicated to Jaggernath, by the Princes of Orissa, who in the fourth century professed the Buddhist religion. (Colonel SYKES, Notes, &c., Asiatic Journal, vol. xii. pp. 275; 317, 420.)]

[Footnote 4:  FA HIAN declares that in the whole of India, including Affghanistan and Bokhara, he found in the fourth century a Buddhist people and dynasty, with traditions of its endurance for the preceding thousand years.  “As to Hindostan itself, he says, from the time of leaving the deserts (of Jaysulmeer and Bikaneer) and the river (Jumna) to the west, all the kings of the different kingdoms in India are firmly attached to the law of Buddha, and when they do honour to the ecclesiastics they take off their diadems.”—­See also MAUPIED, Essai sur l’Origine des Principaux Peuples Anciens, chap. ix. p. 209.]

Looking to its influence at the present day over at least three hundred and fifty millions of human beings—­exceeding one-third of the human race—­it is no exaggeration to say that the religion of Buddha is the most widely diffused that now exists, or that has ever existed since the creation of mankind.[1]

[Footnote 1:  See ante, p. 326.  So ample are the materials offered by Buddhism for antiquarian research, that its doctrines have been sought to be identified at once with the Asiatic philosophy and with the myths of the Scandinavians.  Buddha has been at one time conjectured to be the Woden of the Scythians; at another the prophet Daniel, whom Nebuchadnezzar had created master of the astrologers, or chief priest of the Magi, as the title is rendered in the Septuagint—­[Greek:  Archonta Magoi].  An antiquarian of Wales, in devising a pedigree for the Oymri, has imported ancestors for the ancient Britons from Ceylon; and a writer in the Asiatic Researches, in 1807, as a preamble to the proof that the binomial theorem was familiar to the Hindus, has traced Western civilisation to an irruption of philosophers from India, identified the Druids with the Brahmans, and declared Stonehenge to be “one of the temples of Boodh.” (Asiat.