With respect to the color of gods in the most ancient times of Paganism, there is ample proof remaining that it varied according to the color of the people who cultivate the sciences for the time being. That men with complexions perfectly black, such as the Hindus, the southern Arabians, and the Ethiopians,* were formerly the depositaries of the sciences, perhaps exclusively, is proved by monuments found throughout. * In very ancient maps, Ethiopia extended east of the Red Sea, to the banks of the Euphrates, including all southern Arabia; and if the Ethiopians originally advanced from India into Africa, and founded Egyptian Thebes, we may well suppose that their empire reached to the Indus. This opinion is corroborated by that of Sir William Jones, who says that in very remote times, a nation of people who were blacks, the seat of whose empire was in or near ancient Sidon, ruled ever Egypt and all Asia. If this was the nation spoken of by Sir William Drummond (on zodiacs), according to him, the science of astronomy was at least as well known amongst them, as it is in modern times. Near the city of Benares, in India, are astronomical instruments cut out of the solid rock of a mountain, and formerly used for making observations; but these are so exceedingly ancient, that it is said, _the Brahmins of the present day do not understand the use of them_. India and Egypt. The knowledge of the great truths of astronomy seems to have been as full and perfect in those times as it is now; and as that science, in the hands of skilful god-makers, has supplied emblem gods for the adoration of the ignorant, _in all religions whatever_, we cannot wonder that these personifications of natural objects should take the sable color of the priests who invented and deified them. The great Sphinx, supposed to be one of the oldest as well as most wonderful of these Egyptian monuments, _is a Nubian Black_.* At the time the new version of Hindu superstition spread itself in western Asia and Europe, under the name of Christianity, its machinery was kept out of sight in the archives of the priests; and, as its derivation was known to themselves alone, they did not then deem it indispensably necessary to change the color of their eastern deities; but adopted both Chrishna and his mother, in their sable Gentoo complexions; and, in after times, it was found no easy matter to get them whitewashed. But as these disagreeable facts will raise the angry bristles of the Christian fanatic, it is necessary to support them by the most profoundly learned authorities on the subject.