Professor Max Muller tells us, “was the last to leave the central home of the Aryan family,” and whose history this eminent philologist has now kindly undertaken to impart to him,—­he, the Hindu, claims that while his Indo-European relative was soundly sleeping under the protecting shadow of Noah’s ark, he kept watch and did not miss seeing one event from his high Himalayan fastnesses; and that he has recorded the history thereof, in a language which, though as incomprehensible as the Iapygian inscriptions to the Indo-European immigrant, is quite clear to the writers.  For this crime he now stands condemned as a falsifier of the records of his forefathers.  A place has been hitherto purposely left open for India “to be filled up when the pure metal of history should have been extracted from the ore of Brahmanic exaggeration and superstition.”  Unable, however, to meet this programme, the Orientalist has since persuaded himself that there was nothing in that “ore” but dross.  He did more.  He applied himself to contrast Brahmanic “superstition” and “exaggeration” with Mosaic revelation and its chronology.  The Veda was confronted with Genesis.  Its absurd claims to antiquity were forthwith dwarfed to their proper dimensions by the 4,004 years B.C. measure of the world’s age; and the Brahmanic “superstition and fables” about the longevity of the Aryan Rishis, were belittled and exposed by the sober historical evidence furnished in “The genealogy and age of the Patriarchs from Adam to Noah,” whose respective days were 930 and 950 years; without mentioning Methuselah, who died at the premature age of nine hundred and sixty-nine.

In view of such experience, the Hindu has a certain right to decline the offers made to correct his annals by Western history and chronology.  On the contrary, he would respectfully advise the Western scholar, before he denies point-blank any statement made by the Asiatics with reference to what is prehistoric ages to Europeans, to show that the latter have themselves anything like trustworthy data as regards their own racial history.  And that settled, he may have the leisure and capacity to help his ethnic neighbours to prune their genealogical trees.  Our Rajputs, among others, have perfectly trustworthy family records of an unbroken lineal descent through 2,000 years “B.C.” and more, as proved by Colonel Tod; records which are accepted by the British Government in its official dealings with them.  It is not enough to have studied stray fragments of Sanskrit literature—­even though their number should amount to 10,000 texts, as boasted of—­allowed to fall into foreign hands, to speak so confidently of the “Aryan first settlers in India,” and assert that, “left to themselves, in a world of their own, without a past and without a future (!) before them, they had nothing but themselves to ponder upon,” and therefore could know absolutely nothing of other nations.  To comprehend correctly and make out the inner meaning of most of them, one