Puráńas had undergone no change since his time, such we should expect to find them still. Do they conform edition of his Dictionary, under the word, the Professor explains the “nine gems" to be : “The nine men of letters at the court of Vikramáditya, or, Dhanwantari, Kshapanaka, Amarasimha, Sanku, Vetálabhatta, Ghatakarpara, Kalidasa, Varáhamihira, and Vararuchi.” The tradition about these ornaments he thinks — Meghadita, second edition, Preface, p. v. to be one of those regarding which "there is no reason to dispute the truth." The "authorities" spoken of in the first of the preceding extracts are not specified by Professor Wilson; and they are not known to have fallen yet in the way of any one else. Those authorities apart, he adduces a stanza about the “nine gems", of which he says, that it “appears in a great measure traditionary only; as I have not been able to trace it to any authentic source, although it is in the mouth of every Pandit, when interrogated on the subject." The stanza in question occurs in the Jyotirvidábharana, near its conclusion, where we find the following verses: वर्षे स्मृतिश्रुतिविचारविवेकरम्ये to this description ? Not exactly, in any one instance; to some of them it is utterly inapplicable; to others it only partially applies. There is not one to which it belongs so entirely as to the Vishnu Puráňa; and it is one of the circumstances which gives to this work a शङ्कादिपण्डितवराः कवयस्त्वनेके Here we see named, as contemporaries at the court of Vikramaditya, lord of Málava, in the year 3068 of the Kali age, or B. C. 33 : Mani, Amśudatta, Jishnu, Trilochana, and Hari; also Satya, Srutasena, Badaráyana, Manittha, and Kumárasimha, astronomers; and the “nine gems" already particularized. The writer of the Jyotirvidábharana is represented as professing to be one with the author of the Raghuvansa. As to Vikramaditya, 180 regions are said to have been subject to his sway. Further, according to some verses of which I have not quoted the original, there were 800 viceroys subordinate to him, of picked warriors he had ten millions, and he possessed 400,000 boats. His victims in battle, among Sákas alone, are multiplied to the whimsical aggregate of 555,555,555. These destroyed, he established his era. There is every reason for believing the Jyotirvidábharana to be not only pseudonymous but of recent composition. And now we are prepared to form an opinion touching the credibility of the tradition, so far as yet traced, which concerns the “nine gems" of Vikramaditya. In the Benares Magazine for 1852, pp. 274-276, I first printed and translated the verses just cited and abstracted. A detailed English version of them has been given by the learned Dr. Bháu Dájí, in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal As. Soc., January, 1862, pp. 26 and 27. more authentic character than most of its fellows can pretend to. Yet, even in this instance, we have a book upon the institutes of society and obsequial rites interposed between the Manwantaras and the genealogies of princes; and a life of Krishna, separating the latter from an account of the end of the world; besides the insertion of various legends of a manifestly popular and sectarial character. No doubt, many of the Puráñas, as they now are, correspond with the view which Colonel Vans Kennedy takes of their purport. "I cannot discover, in them," he remarks, "any other object than that of religious instruction." "The description of the earth and of the planetary system, and the lists of royal races that occur in them,” he asserts to be "evidently extraneous, and not essential circumstances; as they are omitted in some Puráñas, and very concisely illustrated, in others; while, on the contrary, in all the Puráńas, some or other of the leading principles, rites, and observances of the Hindu religion are fully dwelt upon, and illustrated, either by suitable legends, or by prescribing the ceremonies to be practised, and the prayers and invocations to be employed, in the worship of different deities." Now, however accurate this description may be of the Puráñas as they are, it is clear that it does not apply to what they were when they were synonymously designated as Panchalakshanas or 'treatises on five topics'; not one of which five is ever specified, by text or comment, to be "religious instruction". In the knowledge of Amara Simha, 1 Researches into the Nature and Affinity of Ancient and Hindu Mythology, p. 153, and note. the lists of princes were not extraneous and unessential; and their being now so considered by a writer so well acquainted with the contents of the Puráñas as Colonel Vans Kennedy, is a decisive proof that, since the days of the lexicographer, they have undergone some material alteration, and that we have not, at present, the same works, in all respects, that were current, under the denomination of Puráñas, in the century prior to Christianity. The inference deduced from the discrepancy between the actual form and the older definition of a Puráňa, unfavourable to the antiquity of the extant works generally, is converted into certainty, when we come to examine them in detail. For, although they have no dates attached to them, yet circumstances are sometimes mentioned, or alluded to, or references to authorities are made, or legends are narrated, or places are particularized, of which the comparatively recent date is indisputable, and which enforce a corresponding reduction of the antiquity of the work in which they are discovered. At the same time, they may be acquitted of subservience to any but sectarial imposture. They were pious frauds for temporary purposes: they never emanated from any impossible combination of the Brahmans to fabricate for the antiquity of the entire Hindu system any claims which it cannot fully support. A very great portion of the contents of many, some portion of the contents of all, is genuine and old. The sectarial interpolation, or embellishment, is always sufficiently palpable to be set aside without injury to the more authentic and primitive material; and the Puránas, although they belong especially to that stage of the Hindu religion in which faith in some one divinity was the prevailing principle, are, also, a valuable record of the form of Hindu belief which came next in order to that of the Vedas; which grafted heroworship upon the simpler ritual of the latter; and which had been adopted, and was extensively, perhaps universally, established in India, at the time of the Greek invasion. The Hercules of the Greek writers was, indubitably, the Balaráma of the Hindus; and their notices of Mathurá on the Jumna, and of the kingdom of the Suraseni and the Pandæan country, evidence the prior currency of the traditions which constitute the argument of the Mahábhárata, and which are constantly repeated in the Puráñas, relating to the Páńdava and Yádava races, to Krishna and his contemporary heroes, and to the dynasties of the solar and lunar kings. The theogony and cosmogony of the Puráñas may, probably, be traced to the Vedas. They are not, as far as is yet known, described in detail in those works; but they are frequently alluded to, in a strain more or less mystical and obscure, which indicates acquaintance with their existence, and which seems to have supplied the Puránas with the groundwork of their systems. The scheme of primary or elementary creation they borrow from the Sánkhya philosophy, which is, probably, one of the oldest forms of speculation on man and nature, amongst the Hindus. Agreeably, however, to that part of the Pauráńik character which there is reason to suspect of later origin, their inculcation of the worship of a favourite deity, they combine the interposition of a creator with the independent evolu |