deduction from it, astronomical calculations included. For every one who has learned and taught knows what a weary long time the beginnings of any science or art take to master, and that, once the first principles are really and firmly grasped, the rest comes with a wonderful and ever-increasing rapidity, with a rush, as it were, partly owing to the training which the mind has undergone in the effort to step from “not thinking" to "thinking," and partly because these same "first principles" really contain the whole art or science, which is only evolved from them, as the variations from the theme, as the play from the plot, or the plant from the seed.

24. One word to conclude this, on the whole, introductory chapter. We have come to speak quite familiarly of "the Aryas' primeval home," of their separations and migrations, as though we knew all about these subjects. We are, in a sense, justified in so speaking and imagining, on the testimony afforded by the formation and evolution of languages, of which we can, to a great extent, pursue the track over and across the vast continent which, though geographically one, has been artificially divided, in conformity with political conditions and school conveniences more than with natural characteristics, into two separate parts of the world: Asia and Europe. The division is entirely arbitrary, for there is no boundary line south of the Ural chain, and that chain itself, important as it is, from its posi tion and the treasures it holds, is anything but separating or forbidding. Of very moderate altitude, with no towering summits or deep-cut gorge-passes,

its several broad, flat-topped ridges slope down imperceptibly on the European side, and are by no means beetling or impassable on the Asiatic side either. This barrier, such as it is, stops short far north of the Caspian Sea, leaving a wide gap of flat steppeland invitingly open to roaming hordes with their cattle and luggage-wagons, with only the mild Ural River or Yaïk to keep up the geographical fiction of a boundary. Through this gap wave after wave of migration and invasion has rolled within the range of historical knowledge, to break into nations. whose original kinship is demonstrated by their languages. The induction is obvious that many more such waves than we can at all be aware of must have rolled back and forward in times wholly out of the reach of our most searching methods. The diverging directions of such migrations-irregularly timed, of course—as we know of in Asia, and only a few of which can have taken the way of the Uralo-Caspian Gap to northwest, to west, to southwest, persua sively point to a centre which, at some incalculably remote period, must have been the starting-point of these departing Aryan hives. Until within the last few years it was the almost universally accepted theory that this centre,-which the lines of march of the several nations, as well as their confronted mythical and cosmogonical traditions, pretty consistently locate somewhere in Central Asia, towards the high but fertile tableland of the Pamir region,-was also the original cradle-home of the primeval Aryas. That question, owing to new elements received into the materials and methods of prehistoric research,

has been lately reopened, and treated, with varying results, by many able and erudite scholars. But, although each of them, of course, honestly and triumphantly believes that he has arrived at the only rational and conclusive solution, it is, as yet, impossible to say when and in what way the question will be finally and unanswerably settled—if ever and at all. Fortunately, it is not of the slightest practical importance for general students; in other words, for any but specialists in ethnology, craniology, etc., and least of all for the subject-matter of this volume. We do not need to pry into the darkness of an incalculable past beyond the centre of departure just mentioned, which is the first landmark of Aryan antiquity touched with a golden ray of the historical dawn. It is sufficient to know that that centre, no matter whence the primeval Âryas of all—the ProtoAryas-may have come, has been a station on which Âryas—may a large portion of the race must have been sojourners for many, many centuries, that portion of it, at all events, of which the two principal limbs, the leading sister nations of the Aryan East, Eranians and Hindus, divided almost within our ken, for reasons easy to conjecture, if not to establish with actual certainty, and some of which have been alluded to in a former volume.

CHAPTER III.

THE SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE.

I. ON the 31st of December, of the year 1600 A.D., Queen Elizabeth signed a charter incorporating into one solid body the hitherto disconnected and independent English merchants who plied the export and import trade between England and India,—or the East Indies, as the Indian Continent began to be called, to distinguish it from the islands discovered a hundred years before by Christopher Columbus and known ever since as "the West Indies," thus perpetuating that great man's geographical mistake. In virtue of this charter, 125 shareholders, with a joint stock of £70,000, entitled themselves "The Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading to the East Indies," both charter and privileges being granted for a limited time, to be renewed on application at stated intervals. Such were the modest beginnings of that famous "East India Company," which was to offer the world the unprecedented spectacle of a private association ruling, with sovereign power and rights, a land of ten times the population of their mother country, sub

jects in one hemisphere, kings in the other, treating with royalties on an equal footing, levying armies, waging war and making peace, signing treaties, and appointing a civil government.

2. Not that the English Company was alone or even first in the field or had things its own way in India from the beginning. On the contrary, the object of its creation was to counteract the influence of the rival company of Portuguese merchants, and to wrest from them some of those profits and advantages which they were monopolizing ever since Vasco de Gama opened the direct route to India, by doubling the Cape of Good Hope in 1498. Through the whole of the sixteenth century the Portuguese had enjoyed an undisputed supremacy in the eastern seas and on the Indian Continent, ingratiating themselves with the numerous princes, Mohammedan and native Hindu, extending their possessions by grants, by purchase, or by actual force. There is no doubt that they contemplated a gradual annexation of province after province and the eventual sovereignty of the entire country. They seemed in a fair way to achieve what they schemed, when the English Company came forward, enterprising and active, and stoutly equipped for vigorous competition, and they almost immediately began to lose ground before the new arrivals, having thoroughly alienated the people by their unscrupulous dealings, their unmitigated rapacity, and their ruthless cruelty in seeking their profits and enforcing, by fire and torture, the so-called conversion of the unfortunate population who had received them with unsuspecting and generous hospi