Other Vishnuite Puranas of a late date are the Brahma, the Naradiya, the Vamana, and the Varaha, the latter two called after the Dwarf and the Boar incarnations of Vishnu. Those which specially favour the cult of Çiva are the Skanda, the Çiva, the Linga, and the Bhavishya or Bhavishyat Puranas. The latter two contain little narrative matter, being rather ritual in character. A Bhavishyat Purana is already mentioned in the Apastamba Dharma Sutra. Besides these eighteen Puranas there is also an equal number of secondary works of the same class called Upa-puranas, in which the epic matter has become entirely subordinate to the ritual element. THE RAMAYANA. Though there is, as we shall see, good reason for supposing that the original part of the Ramayana assumed shape at a time when the Mahabharata was still in a state of flux, we have deferred describing it on account of its connection with the subsequent development of epic poetry in Sanskrit literature. In its present form the Ramayana consists of about 24,000 çlokas, and is divided into seven books. It has been preserved in three distinct recensions, the West Indian (A), the Bengal (B), and the Bombay (C). About one-third of the çlokas in each recension occurs in neither of the other two. The Bombay recension has in most cases preserved the oldest form of the text; for, as the other two arose in the centres of classical Sanskrit literature, where the Gauda and the Vaidarbha styles of composition respectively flourished, the irregularities of the epic language have been removed in them. The Ramayana was here treated as a regular kavya or artificial epic, a fate which the Mahabharata escaped because it early lost its original character, and came to be regarded as a didactic work. These two later recensions must not, however, be looked upon as mere revisions of the Bombay text. The variations of all three are of such a kind that they can for the most part be accounted for only by the fluctuations of oral tradition among the professional reciters of the epic, at the time when the three recensions assumed definite shape in different parts of the country by being committed to writing. After having been thus fixed, the fate of each of these recensions was of course similar to that of any other text. They appear to go back to comparatively early times. For quotations from the Ramayana occurring in works that belong to the eighth and ninth centuries A.D. show that a recension allied to the present C, and probably another allied to the present A, existed at that period. Moreover, Kshemendra's poetical abstract of the epic, the Ramayana-kathasara-manjari, which follows the contents of the original step by step, proves that its author used A, and perhaps B also, in the middle of the eleventh century. Bhoja, the composer of another epitome, the Ramayana-champu, probably used C in the same century.