“Now, I do not so much admire the heaps of ivory of the Indians, their harvests of pepper, their bales of cinnamon, their tempered steel, their mines of silver, and their golden streams, nor that among them, the Ganges, the greatest of all rivers,

  ’Rolls like a monarch on his course, and pours
  His eastern waters through a hundred streams,
  Mingling with ocean by a hundred mouths,’

“nor that these Indians, though situated at the dawn of day, are yet of the colour of night, nor that among them, immense dragons fight with enormous elephants, with parity of danger to their mutual destruction, for they hold them enwrapped in their slippery folds, so that the elephants cannot disengage their legs or in any way extricate themselves from the scaly bonds of the tenacious dragons.  They are forced to seek revenge from the fall of their own bulk and to crush their captors by the mass of their own bodies.

“There are amongst them various kinds of inhabitants.  I will rather speak of the marvellous things of men than of those of nature.

“There is among them a race who know nothing but to tend cattle, hence they are called neatherds; there are races clever in trafficking with merchandise, and others stout in fight, whether with arrows, or hand to hand with swords.

“There is also among them a pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists.

“These I exceedingly admire, for they are men skilled not in propagating the vine, nor in grafting trees, nor in tilling the ground.  They know not how to cultivate the fields, nor to wash gold, or to break horses, or to shear or feed sheep or goats.

“What is it, then, they know?  One thing instead of all these.  They cultivate wisdom, both the aged professors and the young students.  Nothing do I so much admire in them as that they hate torpor of mind and sloth.”

This does not look as if the Indians had been unknown or unappreciated in the second century A.D.

Apuleius is not alone in his respect for the Brahmins.  Many of the Greek writers speak of them under the names of Brahmins or Gymnosophists, but always with great respect.

Strabo states, on the authority of Megasthenes (who it will be remembered was Ambassador from Persia, and lived for some years at Palibothra, about 307 B.C.), that “there were two classes of philosophers or priests, the Brachmanes and the Germanes, but the Brachmanes are best esteemed.”  Towards the close of his account of the “Brachmanes” he says:—­

“In many things they agree with the Greeks, for they affirm that the world was produced, and is perishable, and that it is spherical; that God, governing it as well as framing it, pervades the whole; that the principles of all things are various, but water is the principle of the construction of the world; that besides the four elements there is a fifth, nature—­whence heaven and the stars; that the earth is placed in the centre of all.