which cannot, therefore, be neglected. "As soon as a mother knows she has conceived, a Brahmin must be sent for to read certain formulas; when the child is born a Brahmin must be called for the same purpose, also when it is a week, six months, two years and eight years old, and again when the young people are to be married; in all cases of sickness, at the death-bed, at the cremation of the body, and every month the first year after a person's death; and at each one of these visits the Brahmin is entitled to money or other gifts. Also if a family is subject to any misfortune the Brahmin must be called to conjure the evil powers; if a bird of prey alights on the roof, the owner of the house must call a Brahmin to purify the house by his blessing; when he moves into a new house the Brahmin must bless it beforehand; when a man dies on an _unlucky day_ his son must pay the Brahmin money to ward off a similar calamity from him; when a well is dug a Brahmin must bless it before its water can be used; during eclipses of the sun and the moon everybody sends gifts to the Brahmins; at every change of the moon the Brahmin is entitled to gifts as well as on forty regular holidays every year; during small-pox or cholera ravages he is called to ward off the plague; the farmer cannot reap his grain, the fisherman cannot go to sea, the merchant cannot make a bargain unless he has bought the blessing of the Brahmin and paid for the same." And still the Hindoos possess a high culture, and their civilization is one of the oldest in the world. They are endowed with a strong religious feeling. They are profound, peaceful, diligent, economical and law abiding; many of them have become distinguished in learning, art and science; they have been the teachers of the philosophers and scholars of other nations, and for thousands of years they have pondered deeply on questions pertaining to the human soul, immortality and the life to come, and endeavored to satisfy their craving and yearning for a closer union with the infinite by a devotion and self sacrifices which can well be compared with the sufferings of the Christian martyrs. Accordingly if any people could attain a higher development and a happy condition by other means than the influence of the Christian religion, that people ought to be the Hindoos. Yet, after all their struggles, we now find them on a lower level than they were thousands of years ago. What a picture! All these millions of civilized, peaceful, diligent, sensible people bend their knees before thirty-three millions of disgusting images and pictures, and among all this people, in all their thirty thousand cities there was not a hospital for the sick, not an asylum for the blind or deaf, not a home for lepers or insane, not one voice saying to the lowly and the poor: "Thou art my brother."