and philosophy.... in solitude and contemplation.”  A happy thought suggested, no doubt, by the active life, incessant wars, triumphs, and defeats portrayed in the oldest songs of the Rik-Veda.  Nor can he with the smallest show of logic affirm that “India had no place in the political history of the world,” or that “there are no synchronisms between the history of the Brahmans and that of other nations before the date of the origin of Buddhism in India;” for he knows no more of the prehistoric history of those “other nations” than of that of the Brahman.  All his inferences, conjectures and systematic arrangements of hypotheses begin very little earlier than 200 “B.C.,” if even so much, on anything like really historical grounds.  He has to prove all this before he can command our attention.  Otherwise, however “irrefragable the evidence of language,” the presence of Sanskrit roots in all the European languages will be insufficient to prove, either that (a) before the Aryan invaders descended toward the seven rivers they had never left their northern regions; or (b) why the “eldest brother, the Hindu,” should have been “the last to leave the central home of the Aryan family.”  To the philologist such a supposition may seem “quite natural.”  Yet the Brahman is no less justified in his ever-growing suspicion that there may be at the bottom some occult reason for such a programme.  That in the interest of his theory the Orientalist was forced to make “the eldest brother” tarry so suspiciously long on the Oxus, or wherever “the youngest” may have placed him in his “nascent state” after the latter “saw his brothers all depart towards the setting sun.”  We find reasons to believe that the chief motive for alleging such a procrastination is the necessity to bring the race closer to the Christian era.  To show the “brother” inactive and unconcerned, “with nothing but himself to ponder on,” lest his antiquity and “fables of empty idolatry,” and perhaps his traditions of other people’s doings, should interfere with the chronology by which it is determined to try him.  The suspicion is strengthened when one finds in the book from which we have been so largely quoting—­a work of a purely scientific and philological character—­such frequent remarks and even prophecies as:  “History seems to teach that the whole human race required a gradual education before, in the fulness of time, it could be admitted to the truths of Christianity.”  Or, again “The ancient religions of the world were but the milk of Nature, which was in due time to be succeeded by the bread of life;” and such broad sentiments expressed as that “there is some truth in Buddhism, as there is in every one of the false religions of the world, but....” *

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* Max Muller’s “History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature.”
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The atmosphere of Cambridge and Oxford seems decidedly unpropitious to the recognition of either Indian antiquity, or the merit of the philosophies sprung from its soil!*