It is long since the connoisseur of Indian art awakened from the dream that India has been an isolated country. The fact is, that it lies in the way of all commerce between the far East and the West, and that it can be, and has been, approached as easily from land as from the sea. It has a long legendary history, but a comparatively short real history. The immigration of the Aryan race is said to have taken place about B.C. 3101, but from that period until the rise of Buddhism, in the sixth century B.C., there is nothing to guide us but legend. Putting aside what may have been learned of India by the Greeks from the troops from the Panjab and Afghanistan which swelled the gigantic army of Xerxes, Alexander's invasion of India (B.C. 327) may be said to have really opened the way to the acquisition by the Greeks of something like an exact though partial knowledge of the country pronounced by Herodotus the wealthiest and most populous in the world. In truth, the writings of Greeks who accompanied Alexander, and of Chinese pilgrims, and some temple-inscriptions, constitute the basis of Indian history. The commerce of India at a very early period extended far and wide. Arrian, an Alexandrian merchant of the second century, mentions the muslins of the Ganges, cloths of all sorts, colored shawls and sashes, purple goods, gold embroidery, lac, steel, jewels, perfumes and spices. How long this trade had been going on we cannot say. It was, however, encouraged by the Ptolemies, who established a port on the Red Sea and organized a system of conveyance by means of caravans to the Nile, and so to Alexandria. In this way Indian manufactures reached Europe, while the Persians were at the same time carrying on an extensive trade in the same materials. The Indians further contributed to the advance of commerce by becoming road-builders, and thus bringing the manufacturing places along the valley of the Ganges into connection with the Panjab in the north-west and with ports and trading-stations in the west and south. Thus, Egypt and Assyria were brought into commercial intercourse with the eastern tract of the valley of the Ganges--that lying between the modern Allahabad and Calcutta. That commerce spread in other directions there can be no doubt. Within three centuries of the foundation of Buddhism it had penetrated to Ceylon, and reached Tibet and China in the first century of our era. Let us look at one stupendous fact as indicative of international intercourse with India--namely, that Buddhism, which has all but disappeared from the land of its birth, is at the present moment the religion of about five hundred millions of human beings occupying the continent of Asia from the Caspian to the Pacific, from Tartary to China and Japan.