It is a far more difficult task to ascertain whether we shall ever recover the History of India before the time of the advent of Buddha, or before the Anjana epoch, B.C. 691. Here we certainly will find no coins or inscriptions to guide us, and no buildings to illustrate the arts, or to mark the position of cities, while all ethnographic traces have become so blurred, if not obliterated, that they serve us little as guides through the labyrinth. Yet on the other hand there is so large a mass of literature--such as it is--bearing on the subject, that we cannot but hope that, when a sufficient amount of learning is brought to bear upon it, the leading features of the history of even that period may be recovered. In order, however, to render it available, it will not require industry so much as a severe spirit of criticism to winnow the few grains of useful truth out of the mass of worthless chaff this literature contains. But it does not seem too much to expect even this, from the severely critical spirit of the age. Meanwhile, the main facts of the case seem to be nearly as follows, in so far as it is necessary to state them, in order to make what follows intelligible. ARYANS. At some very remote period in the world’s history--for reasons stated in the Appendix I believe it to have been at about the epoch called by the Hindus the Kali Yug, or B.C. 3101--the Aryans, a Sanscrit-speaking people, entered India across the Upper Indus, coming from Central Asia. For a long time they remained settled in the Punjab, or on the banks of the Sarasvati, then a more important stream than now, the main body, however, still remaining to the westward of the Indus. If, however, we may trust our chronology, we find them settled 2000 years before the Christian Era, in Ayodhya, and then in the plenitude of their power. It was about that time apparently that the event took place which formed the groundwork of the far more modern poem known as the ‘Ramayana.’ The pure Aryans, still uncontaminated by admixture with the blood of the natives, then seem to have attained the height of their prosperity in India, and to have carried their victorious arms, it may be, as far south as Ceylon. There is, however, no reason to suppose that they at that time formed any permanent settlements in the Deccan, but it was at all events opened to their missionaries, and by slow degrees imbibed that amount of Brahmanism which eventually pervaded the whole of the south. Seven or eight hundred years after that time, or it may be about or before B.C. 1200, took place those events which form the theme of the more ancient epic known as the ‘Mahabharata,’ which opens up an entirely new view of Indian social life. If the heroes of that poem were Aryans at all, they were of a much less pure type than those who composed the songs of the Vedas, or are depicted in the verses of the ‘Ramayana.’ Their polyandry, their drinking bouts, their gambling tastes, and love