If at such a comparatively modern period as the third century before Christ, the Babylonian historian Berosus composed his fictions, which assigned to that monarchy such incredible antiquity, it became capable of refutation from the many historians of repute who preceded him. But on the fabulist of India we have no such check. If Vyasa himself penned these legends as now existing, then is the stream of knowledge corrupt from the fountain-head. If such the source, the stream, filtering through ages of ignorance, has only been increased by fresh impurities. It is difficult to conceive how the arts and sciences could advance, when it is held impious to doubt the truth of whatever has been handed down, and still more to suppose that the degenerate could improve thereon. The highest ambition of the present learned priesthood, generation after generation, is to be able to comprehend what has thus reached them, and to form commentaries upon past wisdom; which commentaries are commented on _ad infinitum_. Whoever dare now aspire to improve thereon must keep the secret in his own breast. They are but the expounders of the olden oracles; were they more they would be infidels. But this could not always have been the case. With the Hindus, as with other nations, the progress to the heights of science they attained must have been gradual; unless we take from them the merit of original invention, and set them down as borrowers of a system. These slavish fetters of the mind must have been forged at a later period, and it is fair to infer that the monopoly of science and religion was simultaneous. What must be the effect of such monopoly on the impulses and operations of the understanding? Where such exists, knowledge could not long remain stationary; it must perforce retrograde. Could we but discover the period when religion[2.2.2] ceased to be a _profession_ [27] and became hereditary (and that such there was these very genealogies bear evidence), we might approximate the era when science attained its height. =The Priestly Office.=—In the early ages of these Solar and Lunar dynasties, the priestly office was not hereditary in families; it was a profession; and the genealogies exhibit frequent instances of branches of these races terminating their martial career in the commencement of a religious sect, or _gotra_, and of their descendants reassuming their warlike occupations. Thus, of the ten sons of Ikshwaku,[2.2.3] three are represented as abandoning worldly affairs and taking to religion; and one of these, Kanina, is said to be the first who made an _agnihotra_, or pyreum, and worshipped fire, while another son embraced commerce. Of the Lunar line and the six sons of Pururavas, the name of the fourth was Raya; “from him the fifteenth generation was Harita, who with his eight brothers took to the office of religion, and established the Kausika Gotra, or tribe of Brahmans.”