Part 6

Precious stones or amulets with Sanscrit inscriptions have repeatedly been found in tombs, which must date back to at least B.C. 1400.

In tracing back the history of Chemistry, we constantly find reference to Hermes, Trismegistus, who would seem to be the god Thoth, or Taaut of the Egyptians. The famous inscription of the Emerald table ascribes to him the possession of three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. I have been much struck with the resemblance of this god Taaut with the Menu of the Hindoos, who also was credited with saving from destruction by the flood the three Vedas, which were supposed to contain all that was required for man's direction here below.

There would appear to have been also other Hermes, but if we look at the condition of things which obtained in Egypt when the Pyramids of Memphis are supposed to have been erected, within 300 years of the supposed date of the deluge, and that the Beni Hassan tombs, about 300 years later, depict the manners and customs of what we cannot help admitting, was a highly civilized nation, we must be struck with the fact that the distance of time between the deluge and the building of these pyramids and tombs is so short, that it might be represented by a comparison of our own date with those of Queen Elizabeth and Henry the Third.

Jackson in his "Antiquities" tells us that, Sanchoniatho states that the most ancient Phoenician records show that letters were invented soon after the dispersion of mankind, by Tsaut, the son of Mizor or Misraim, who was the first Egyptian Hermes or Thoth. He went out of Phoenicia, and first, with a colony of Mizrites, settled and reigned in Egypt, and, according to Cicero, gave both laws and letters to the Egyptians.

This Hermes was born in the second generation after the flood, and was not only the inventor of letters and writing, but he is also said to have delineated the sacred characters or symbols of the elements and planets, viz.,--sun, moon, earth, air, fire, water, &c.

These symbols are without doubt of very ancient origin, and Boerhæve in his Theory of Chemistry explains them hieroglyphically as follows:--

The symbols, or at least some of them, may be traced even in the Chinese characters for gold, silver, &c.

The connection of Egypt with India shortly after the Christian era is distinctly indicated in the works of Apuleius. He lived in the early part of the second century after Christ, and was educated first at Carthage, then renowned as a school of literature. He then travelled extensively in Greece, Asia, and Egypt, and became initiated into many religious fraternities and an adept in their mysteries. He was admitted a priest of the order of Æsculapius, and describes the ceremony of the offering of the first-fruits by the priests of Isis, when the navigation opened in spring. The vessel, which was to be set adrift upon the ocean freighted with the offering, was splendidly decorated and covered with hieroglyphics, and after having been "purified with a lighted torch, an egg, and sulphur," was allowed to sail away into the unknown as a sacrifice to procure the safety of the convoy of ships which would soon after start upon their voyage. These rites were of great antiquity.

He speaks, in his first tale, of a witch who, by means of her magic charms, made not only her fellow-countrymen love her, but "the Indians even," and in his initiation into the mysteries of Isis, his robes "bore pictures of Indian serpents."

From what I have now laid before you, in what must necessarily be a very imperfect manner, you will see that there is good reason to believe that in the study of science and philosophy the Indian races were much in advance of the Western nations. The age of science amongst them is very great; we fail utterly in trying to find its beginning, unless we accept 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 elephants cannot disengage their legs or in any way extricate themselves from the scaly bonds of the tenacious dragons. They are forced to seek revenge from the fall of their own bulk and to crush their captors by the mass of their own bodies.

"There are amongst them various kinds of inhabitants. I will rather speak of the marvellous things of men than of those of nature.

"There is among them a race who know nothing but to tend cattle, hence they are called neatherds; there are races clever in trafficking with merchandise, and others stout in fight, whether with arrows, or hand to hand with swords.

"There is also among them a pre-eminent race called Gymnosophists.

"These I exceedingly admire, for they are men skilled not in propagating the vine, nor in grafting trees, nor in tilling the ground. They know not how to cultivate the fields, nor to wash gold, or to break horses, or to shear or feed sheep or goats.

"What is it, then, they know? One thing instead of all these. They cultivate wisdom, both the aged professors and the young students. Nothing do I so much admire in them as that they hate torpor of mind and sloth."

This does not look as if the Indians had been unknown or unappreciated in the second century A.D.

Apuleius is not alone in his respect for the Brahmins. Many of the Greek writers speak of them under the names of Brahmins or Gymnosophists, but always with great respect.

Strabo states, on the authority of Megasthenes (who it will be remembered was Ambassador from Persia, and lived for some years at Palibothra, about 307 B.C.), that "there were two classes of philosophers or priests, the Brachmanes and the Germanes, but the Brachmanes are best esteemed." Towards the close of his account of the "Brachmanes" he says:--

"In many things they agree with the Greeks, for they affirm that the world was produced, and is perishable, and that it is spherical; that God, governing it as well as framing it, pervades the whole; that the principles of all things are various, but water is the principle of the construction of the world; that besides the four elements there is a fifth, nature--whence heaven and the stars; that the earth is placed in the centre of all.

"Such, and many other things are affirmed of reproduction and of the soul. Like Plato, they devise fables concerning the immortality of the soul, and the judgment in the infernal regions, and other similar notions. These things are said of the Brachmanes."

Clemens Alexandrinus, after saying that philosophy flourished in ancient times amongst the barbarians, and afterwards was introduced amongst the Greeks, instances the prophets of the Egyptians, the Chaldees of the Assyrians, the Druids of the Gauls (Galatæ), the Samauæans of the Bactrians, the philosophers of the Celts, the Magi of the Persians, and the Gymnosophists of the Indians. The Greek authors distinctly speak of the Brahmins as the chief of the castes or divisions of the Indian people from the time of Megasthenes, who wrote of them in the fourth century B.C.

Sir William Jones, in a paper on the philosophy of the Asiatics, pointed out that "the old philosophers of Europe had some idea of centripetal force, and a principle of universal gravitation," and affirms that "much of the theology and philosophy of our immortal Newton may be found in the Vedas."

"That most subtle spirit which he suspected to pervade natural bodies, and lying concealed in them, to cause attraction and repulsion, the emission, reflection and refraction of light, electricity, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion, is described by the Hindus as a fifth element, endowed with these very powers; and the Vedas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they chiefly ascribe to the sun, thence called 'Aditya, or the attractor,' a name designed by the mythologists to mean the child of the goddess Aditi. But the most wonderful passage on the theory of attractions occurs in the charming allegorical poem of 'Shi'ri'n and Ferhai'd, or the Divine Spirit, and a human soul disinterestedly pious,' a work which, from the first verse to the last, is a blaze of religious and poetical fire.