The Vishnu Purana is described as that in which Parásara, beginning with the events of the Varáha Kalpa, expounds man’s moral and religious obligations in about seven thousand stanzas. It is divided into six books:-- The first deals chiefly with the details of creation, primary (Sarga) and secondary (Pratisarga); the first explaining how the universe proceeds from Prakriti or eternal crude matter; the second, in what way “the forms of things are developed from the elementary substances previously evolved, or how they reappear after their temporary destruction.” Both these creations are periodical; the first does not end until the life of Brahma ends, when not only the gods and all other forms are annihilated, but the elements are resolved into the primary substance, besides which one only spiritual being exists. The latter occurs at the end of every Kalpa, æon, or day of Brahma, and is wholly limited to the forms of inferior creatures and the lower worlds; leaving untouched sages and gods and the substance of the heavens. A description of the ages or periods of time on which these events depend is involved in the explanation; and it is given accordingly in wearisome detail. Their character has been a source of very unnecessary perplexity to European writers; for they belong to a wholly mythological scheme of chronology, which has no reference to any real or supposed history of the Hindus, but prefigures, according to their system, the infinite and eternal revolutions of the universe. By a singular incongruity the existence of Pradhána, or crude matter, is identified with Vishnu, who is declared to be both spirit and crude matter, and not only crude matter, but all visible substance, and Time. He is Purusha, “spirit;” Pradhána, “crude matter;” Vyakta, “visible form;” and Kála, “time.” “This,” says Professor Wilson, “cannot but be regarded as a departure from the primitive dogmas of the Hindus, in which the distinctness of the Deity and His works was enunciated; in which, upon His willing the world to be, it was; and in which His interposition in creation, held to be inconsistent with the quiescence of perfection, was explained away by the personification of attributes in action, which afterwards came to be considered as real divinities, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, charged severally, for a given season, with the creation, preservation, and temporary annihilation of material forms.” In the Vishnu Purana, these divinities are declared to be no other than Vishnu.