to suspect,” says Professor Ray, “that the lines (of the _Sukraniti_) relating to gunpowder ... are interpolations.” The suspicion is further enhanced when it is borne in mind that in the “Polity of Kamandaki,” an ancient work of undoubted authenticity, “there occurs no reference whatever to firearms, nor is there any in the _Agnipurana_, in which the subject of training in the use of arms and armour takes up four chapters.... The more rational conclusion would be that the _Sukraniti_ is a patchwork, in which portions of chap. iv. were added some time after the introduction of gunpowder in Indian warfare during the Moslem period.”[244] “The last chapter is apparently spurious,” says Rajendralala Mitra, “as it describes guns as they existed a hundred years ago.”[245] Finally, Herr von Romocki utterly rejects Dr. Oppert’s theory.[246] The military history of India confirms the conclusions of the writers who have been quoted: not a fact is to be found there which lends any support to the theory of early gunpowder in India. The employment of gunpowder in Europe revolutionised the art of war and affected, more or less, almost every human institution. “The military art,” says Gibbon, “has been changed by the invention of gunpowder.... Mathematics, chymistry, mechanics, architecture, have been applied to the science of war.”[247] Gunpowder, says A. Comte, “en emprimant à l’art de la guerre un caractère de plus en plus scientifique, a directement tendu à intéresser tous les pouvoirs à l’actif dévellopement continu de la philosophie naturelle.”[248] We may reasonably assume that the discovery of so tremendous an agent as gunpowder would have produced in India some few effects, at least, similar in their general features to the effects it produced in Europe. To mention one or two details: Sanskrit would have coined a word for saltpetre, which it did not possess; the use of the bow would have been curtailed; a lasting mark would have been put on fortifications; and some few specimens of the early firearms might have survived. Not a trace of these or similar changes is to be found; not a vestige of early firearms has remained. General Cunningham thought that the state of the ruins of certain ancient Kashmir temples proves the use of an explosive in their destruction,[249] but more prolonged observation shows that their condition is chiefly the effect of natural agencies. “The fingers of Time, and moderate movements of the earth, have been making openings in some of the other old Hindu buildings in Kashmir,” such as the little temple of Payach and the splendid temple of Martand; “and from their appearance it may be believed that these same agencies, together with undermining work applied for wilful destruction, could do what has been done.”[250] The plentiful supply of saltpetre to be found in the valley of the Ganges has been brought forward as a proof that the ancient Hindus must have had gunpowder, but the fact proves nothing.