erally, is realized in India's most southern and latest annexed appendage, the Isle of Ceylon. That island, about three fourths the size of Ireland, is in very truth what the adjoining continent was long erroneously thought to be: the richest mine in the world of the rarest, choicest precious stones of nearly every known kind; independently of and apart from its pearl-fisheries, which yield the most perfect pearls in existence, surpassing even those of the Persian Gulf in purity and soft radiance. Nor is the island less surpassingly endowed with regard to vegetation. The interior is one huge tropical forest, where all the palms, timber-trees, gum-trees, spice- and fruittrees of India thrive side by side with those of Europe and other temperate zones; the cotton there grows to the size of a real tree, and justifies the apparently exaggerated accounts of the Greeks (see p. ); and to all these must be added the coffee-tree which grows wild, and the wonderful bread-tree, not to speak of the vanilla vine, cinnamon, and other most valuable plants, and, of late, the successful tea plantations. In its animal creation, Ceylon is not less blest: it abounds in most kinds of handsome and useful animals, except horses, which are entirely wanting, and is renowned for its breed of elephants, the finest and cleverest, though not the largest, in India. If to all these advantages we add a soil that regularly yields three harvests a year, a glorious and most wholesome climate, not afflicted with extreme heat, notwithstanding the island's position so near the equator, but maintained on a mild and pretty uniform level by a perfect combination of sea and

mountains, and, as a consequence, absence of fever and all malarial affections, we shall understand why this chosen spot, which Milton might have had in his mind's eye when he spoke of isles

has been called the jewel casket and finishing glory of India; and we may pre-eminently apply to it the name of "Wonderland of the East," even though it assuredly beseems all this peerless portion of our habitable earth.

CHAPTER II.

THE ÂRYAS.

"Who can see the green earth any more

As she was by the sources of Time?

Who imagines her fields as she lay

In the sunshine unworn by the plough?
Who thinks as they thought,

The tribes who then roamed on her breast,

Her vigorous, primitive sons?"

MATTHEW ARNOLD, from The Future.

I. IN a work which undertakes to present, in a set of parallel pictures, the history of several nations, differing in race, culture, and religion, but covering pretty much the same span of the world's age, it is at times very difficult to keep them well apart, because the influences to which they mutually subject one another cannot be ignored, unless we are willing to content ourselves with fragmentary and fanciful sketches, leaving a good half of the characteristic traits either indistinct or unaccounted for. This difficulty increases considerably when we have to do with two nations derived from the same stock, and exhibiting such striking affinities, such undenia

ble resemblances, as to betray their original identity at every turn and make us feel as though we can actually grasp and hold fast the time when they were as yet undivided, even though that time may lie far beyond all calculable bounds of historical research. Two such sister nations we have in the Aryan Hindus and Eranians. It is impossible to do justice to the history and culture of the one without drawing the other into the same field of vision and comparing the two,-a process which necessarily brings out their common origin, by presenting identical or similar features, obviously borrowed by neither from the other, but inherited by both from a common ancestry. It was thus that in a former volume, when treating of the Eranians, their culture and their religion, we were unavoidably led to trespass on the ground reserved for the present work.' found it impossible, "in dealing with the Aryan peoples of Erân, to separate them entirely from their brethren of India, these two Asiatic branches of the Aryan tree being so closely connected in their beginnings, the sap coursing through both being so evidently the same life-blood, that a study of the one necessarily involves a parallel study of the other." " Thus we were actually compelled to stop for a brief glimpse at the conditions which regulated the existence of the ancestors of both in the period that has been called "Indo-Eranian," i. e., the period before the future settlers of Erân and the future conquerors of India had separated, before they had

2

1 See Story of Media, Babylon, and Persia, chap. ii.-v. 2 Ibid., p. 36.

We

severally wandered into the countries, far distant from one another and from the primeval home, of which they were to win and hold possession through well-nigh countless future ages.

2. A cursory sketch was sufficient for the comprehension of Eranian history, because the nations of this branch soon diverged very widely from the parent stock, and went their own separate and strongly individual way. Not so the peoples who descended into India and settled there. The nations of this branch were merely the continuation of the mother trunk. They did not break with any of their ancestral traditions, but, on the contrary, faithfully treasured them, and only in the course of time and further migrations, developed from them, not an opposition, but a progressive and consistent sequel, in the shape of a more elaborate religion and, later on, philosophical systems and speculations, based on the same principles, which, in ruder, simpler forms, had been their intellectual inheritance from the first. At the present stage of our studies, therefore, we must pause for a longer and more searching retrospect, if we mean to follow out and comprehend the long and gradual evolution of the people who, of all Orientals, are nearest akin to us in thought, in feeling, in manner, and in language. By doing so, we feel assured that we are reconstructing the past of our own race at its entrance on the career of conscious humanity, that we are learning how our own fathers, in incalculably remote ages, not only lived and labored, but thought and prayed,—nay, how they began to think and to pray.