That is about all Western history knows of its genesis. Like Ravana's brother, Kumbhakarna,--the Hindu Rip van Winkle--it slept for a long series of ages a dreamless, heavy sleep. And when at last it awoke to consciousness, it was but to find the "nascent Aryan race" grown into scores of nations, peoples and races, most of them effete and crippled with age, many irretrievably extinct, while the true origin of the younger ones it was utterly unable to account for. So much for the "youngest brother." As for "the eldest brother, the Hindu," who, Professor Max Muller tells us, "was the last to leave the central home of the Aryan family," and whose history this eminent philologist has now kindly undertaken to impart to him,--he, the Hindu, claims that while his Indo-European relative was soundly sleeping under the protecting shadow of Noah's ark, he kept watch and did not miss seeing one event from his high Himalayan fastnesses; and that he has recorded the history thereof, in a language which, though as incomprehensible as the Iapygian inscriptions to the Indo-European immigrant, is quite clear to the writers. For this crime he now stands condemned as a falsifier of the records of his forefathers. A place has been hitherto purposely left open for India "to be filled up when the pure metal of history should have been extracted from the ore of Brahmanic exaggeration and superstition." Unable, however, to meet this programme, the Orientalist has since persuaded himself that there was nothing in that "ore" but dross. He did more. He applied himself to contrast Brahmanic "superstition" and "exaggeration" with Mosaic revelation and its chronology. The Veda was confronted with Genesis. Its absurd claims to antiquity were forthwith dwarfed to their proper dimensions by the 4,004 years B.C. measure of the world's age; and the Brahmanic "superstition and fables" about the longevity of the Aryan Rishis, were belittled and exposed by the sober historical evidence furnished in "The genealogy and age of the Patriarchs from Adam to Noah," whose respective days were 930 and 950 years; without mentioning Methuselah, who died at the premature age of nine hundred and sixty-nine.