It is hard to believe that gunpowder was known to a people whose language contained no word for saltpetre;[237] that cannon were used by men whose books make no allusion to gunpowder, with the exception just mentioned. “It is peculiar,” says Dr. Oppert, “that powder should not have been mentioned in Sanskrit works” (p. 63). The same peculiarity is observable in Anglo-Saxon works, and is probably due to the same cause. But the fatal objection to the existence of this very early explosive is the admitted fact that after a time it was discarded and forgotten. Writers who lightly tell us so are apparently unconscious of the greatness of the demand they make upon our credulity. They ask us, in effect, to accept the astonishing proposition, that a nation voluntarily surrendered, without any assignable cause, an incalculable “advantage” in the “struggle for existence”—the eager, continuous, and unending preparation for self-defence which is, in Mr. Bagehot’s words, “the most showy fact” in human history. It is infinitely more probable that the passages in the two poems which mention gunpowder and cannon were interpolated by the scribes of after-ages than that the Hindus wantonly broke the first and strongest law of human nature, the law of self-defence. There can be no reasonable doubt that the recipe for gunpowder in the _Sukraniti_ is an interpolation. The proportions are given in the first place as 5:1:1, and then it is added, “if the powder is to be used for a gun,” let them be 4:1:1, or 6:1:1.[238] And why not 5:1:1 also? This recipe was not written by a gunner: it is the handiwork of some charlatan of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, who imagined that, by making a certain mystery about the proportions 5:1:1, he should give a semblance of great antiquity to the recipe. But he blundered badly about the proportions. The proportions 4:1:1 were only reached by the Swedes about the middle of the sixteenth[239] century, and approached by the English about the middle of the seventeenth,[240] and powder of such strength would have blown weak, early bombards to pieces. Other sound reasons are given by competent critics for rejecting from first to last the allusions to firearms contained in the two poems. A critic in _Nature_ points out that a work which mentions the Hunas (Huns or Europeans) cannot be of the age apparently assigned by Dr. Oppert to the _Nitiprakásika_.[241] “Oppert,” says Sir R. Burton, “shows no reason why the allusions to, and descriptions of, gunpowder and firearms should not be held modern interpolations into these absurd compositions.”[242] Mr. W. F. Sinclair concludes from the strong resemblance between the firearms described and those which we know were imported into India during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, either that the MSS. date no further back than the sixteenth century, or that the allusions to firearms were interpolated at that period.[243] “One is naturally led