their main substance they go back as far as the fourth or fifth century before our era. Many of their legends may be referred to a much earlier period. And, while their relations to each other are not very clearly settled, this at least is certain, that in both have been worked over very ancient Vedic myths from age to age, in the interest of fresh experiences, all taken up, as they came, into this epical transfiguration. Such the creative imagination of the race.1 Disunity. Yet it could never organize itself into one united nation. From the beginning this vast peninsula, one-third as large as Europe, has been divided among a multitude of distinct tribes. The little kingdoms warred with each other; and now and then some greater chief would master his neighbors on every side, and build up some brilliant dynasty, like the Maurya or the Gupta, or in later times the Mahratta, and perhaps organize a wide movement for Hindu independence: all of which would last a little while, and then disappear, like cirrus streamers in the blue deeps of the Indian sky, or fleeting thoughts in the heaven of Hindu dreams. It was the mutual jealousy and strife of the Hindu kings, not the lack of military spirit nor of military resources, that made this great people a prey to the invading Moslem from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries of our era. A glut of food in one English province of India has often occurred at the same time with a famine in an adjoining one; yet the intercourse between them has been insufficient to make the abundance of the one supply the lack of 1 The Râmâyana has been translated into Italian by Gorresio, and into French by Fauche. Monier Williams has given a careful abstract of it, as also of the Mahâbhârata, in his admirable little volume on Indian Epic Poetry, and a new English rhymed version by Griffith is in course of publication. Many of the finest episodes in both poems will be found translated in Jolowicz's Orientalische Poesie. the other. There are at this very day, it is estimated,2 twenty-one distinct nations in India, each of which possesses a language in many respects peculiar to itself. "Villages lie side by side for a thousand years, without any considerable intermixture of these distinct tongues." Hindustâni in the north of India and Tamil in the south, represent, generally, the difference between the two great classes of languages derived respectively from the Aryan and the indigenous, perhaps Negrito, perhaps Turanic, tribes. But, however widely diffused, these two types but feebly express the diversities of speech which render the writings of Hindustâni schools in Bombay unintelligible to races in the north-west of India, and make it more easy for an educated native of that city to hold intercourse with one from Bengal or Madras in English than in any other tongue.3 Political tion. The earlier Hindus had well-organized governments, much lauded by the Greek writers, to whom organiza- we owe our earliest reliable notices of India, for the wise and thoughtful manner in which the interests of trade and agriculture were protected, the wants of strangers, as of the sick and needy, supplied, and the defence of the state secured. The law-books contain minute regulations for freights and markets, and just rules for partnerships and organizations in trade, for testing weights, measures, and money, and punishing dishonest dealing.5 And the organization of the village communities throughout 1 Westminster Review, July, 1859. 2 Mackay's Reports on Western India, p. 29. Perry on the Distribution of the Languages of India, Journal of Roy. Asiatic Soc. (Bombay branch), for January, 1853. See especially Megasthenes, in Strabo, De Situ Orbis, B. xv. See Lassen, in Ztschr. d. D. M. G. (1862). Northern India, from very early times, was an elaborate system of local self-government, that showed how large an amount of personal and social freedom could be maintained, even under the depressing shadow of caste. But these steps in political science never led onwards to unity and nationality, nor to any form of constructive policy on a large scale, or for a common end. Foreign Relations. India has at all times been famous for its domestic and foreign trade. In the early days of the Roman Empire, it was a great commercial centre for the merchants of Italy and Egypt, as it was at a much earlier period for all Asiatic races, from Phoenicia in the West to China in the East. The oldest codes record a very advanced system of commercial exchanges among the Hindu tribes, regulated by wise and just provisions; and a high respect for trade is shown by the permission granted the Brahmans, in violation of caste, to earn their support by assuming the functions of the Vaiśya, or mercantile class. In more than one epoch, the resources of India, natural and industrial as well as intellectual, have made the wealth of great empires. Its delicate tissues, its marvellous colors and dyes, its porcelains, its work in metals and precious stones, its dainty essences and perfumes, have not only been the wonder and delight of Europe, but in no slight degree helped in the revival of art. But, after all, the Hindus have shown little practical enterprise, and there was a certain passive quality in their best performance; even in that fine manipulation that wove gossamer fabrics, and wrought the precious metals with such eminent suc 1 Manu, X. 83; Yajnavalkya, III.; Lassen, Ind. Alt., II. 572-576. cess. It has been believed that they could have taken little pains to export these products, since the sailor was held in slight respect by their laws; that most of their trade was carried in foreign bottoms; and that the Mohammedans first introduced coinage among them, their only previous currency being shells.1 We read indeed of wealthy merchants in their dramatic works, and traces of their mercantile establishments are found far to the east and west of India. Yet, on the whole, it is probable that other nations had to come to them. They have always been mainly an agricultural people, the whole population averaging only about one hundred to the square mile. Their scholars did not travel. Only a great religious and moral inspiration, like Buddhism, could rouse Hindu thought to seek geographical expansion. Only here and there we find traces of embassies; and these, mainly for political objects, to the courts of China, Rome, and Egypt. Yet the intellectual life of India was profoundly felt throughout the ancient world. Greece, Persia, Egypt even, went to sit at the feet of these serene dreamers on the Indus and under the banyan shades, from the time of Alexander downwards; and there they marvelled at the power of philosophy to achieve ideal virtue. And what treasures of European fable, legend, and mythic drama further testify to the extent of our indebtedness to India in the sphere of imagination and fancy, down to the magic mirror, the golden egg, the purse of Fortunatus, the cap of invisibility! The Hindus reasoned of war itself as if it were a Sciences. flash out of the brain, a piece of metaphysics. 1 Journal Roy. As. Soc. of Bengal (Philolog., 1867). See the Bhagavadgitâ. They loved to press beyond material successions or conditions to general forms and essential processes; pursuing with special success those studies that afford the largest field for abstraction and contemplation, - the orderly movement of the stars, the laws of numbers, the structure of language, the processes of thought. They made much progress in analytic arithmetic, and not only applied algebra to astronomy and geometry, but geometry to the demonstration of algebraic rules.1 They seem to have invented numerical signs and the decimal system; the zero itself being of Sanskrit descent, and the old Hindu figures being still clearly traceable in those of the later Arabic digits. The introduction of these numerical signs in place of the alphabetic characters before used by all other nations of antiquity — a change ascribed by old writers to the Pythagoreans, those Orientalists of the Greek world, but probably an importation from India through the Arabians of Bagdad was the finest ideal impulse ever given to arithmetical studies. The decimal system was developed in India as a speculative calculus so earnestly, that special names were given to every power in an ascending scale of enormous reach. The fifty-third power of ten was taken as a unit, and on this new base another scale of numbers rose till a figure was reached consisting of unity followed by four hundred and twenty-one zeros. And these elements were applied to the solution of ideal problems, such as "the number of atoms containable in the limits of the world taken as a fixed dimension;" representing mathematical reality none the less for being so utterly past conception." The Arabians. 1 Colebrooke, Hindu Algebra, Introd., pp. xiv., xv. * Woepcke., Mem. sur les Chiffres Indiens, in Journal Asiatique (1863). |