What can be thought of Prof. Weber's endeavour when, "to determine more accurately the position of Ramayana (called by him the 'artificial epic') in literary history," he ends with an assumption that "it rests upon an acquaintance with the Trojan cycle of legend .... the conclusion there arrived at is that the date of its composition is to be placed at the commencement of the Christian era in an epoch when the operation of the Greek influence upon India had already set in!" (p. 194.) The case is hopeless. If the "internal chronology" and external fitness of things, we may add presented in the triple Indian epic, did not open the eyes of the hypercritical professors to the many historical facts enshrined in their striking allegories; if the significant mention of "black Yavanas," and "white Yavanas," indicating totally different peoples, could so completely escape their notice;* and the enumeration of a host of tribes, nations, races, clans, under their separate Sanskrit designations in the Mahbharata, had not stimulated them to try to trace their ethnic evolution and identify them with their now living European descendants, there is little to hope from their scholarship except a mosaic of learned guesswork. The latter scientific mode of critical analysis may yet end some day in a consensus of opinion that Buddhism is due wholesale to the "Life of Barlaam and Josaphat," written by St. John of Damascus; or that our religion was plagiarized from that famous Roman Catholic legend of the eighth century in which our Lord Gautama is made to figure as a Christian Saint, better still, that the Vedas were written at Athens under the auspices of St. George, the tutelary successor of Theseus. --------- * See Twelfth Book of Mahabharata, Krishnas fight with Kalayavana. ---------