the tradition which ascribes to Menu, their great lawgiver (who is
supposed to have been Noah), the saving of three out of the four divine
books or Vedas from the deluge. This would carry us back to the
Antediluvian times for the beginning of our investigations; but without
taking any such extreme view of the subject we will find traces of
science clearly marked out for us in the history of the Indian races.

The picture of the Brahmins, drawn by Apuleius in the second century,
shows how little they have changed in historical times. He says:--

“The Indians are a populous nation of vast extent of territory, situated
far from us to the east, near the reflux of the ocean and the rising of
the sun, under the first beams of the stars, and at the extreme verge of
the earth, beyond the learned Egyptians and the superstitious Jews and
the mercantile Nabathæans; and the flowing robed Aracidae, and the
Ityraeans, poor in crops, and the Arabians, rich in perfumes.

“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