I reserve for Part II. details concerning the modern Indian Sword and the blades imitated from it. Lieutenant-Colonel Pollok (Madras Staff Corps)[714] describes, unfortunately without illustration, the Burmese Dalwel (‘Dalwey,’ vol. ii. p. 18) or fighting-Sword, a ‘nasty two-handed weapon with a blade about two feet long, and as sharp as a razor’ (i. 51). He also notices the Dha, or Dhaw, a knife six inches long, equally fitted for domestic use and stabbing. NOTE.—My lamented friend Dr. Burnell, whose loss to Anglo-Oriental philology is so deeply felt, took a notable part in reducing Hindú claims to remote antiquity. Whereas Sir William Jones, a _littérateur_ thoroughly well imposed upon, dated the Laws of Menu from A.D. 1280, Burnell boldly assigned them to the fourth century A.D., and partly to a much later period. The Theatre of Kalidása (Sakuntala, Urwasi, &c.) he has attributed to the sixth century instead of the first; in fact he leaves nothing to B.C. but parts of the Vedas and the earliest Buddhist texts. We can accept the reform unhesitatingly. The oldest Hindú inscription (Girnár) dates from about B.C. 250; the oldest Cave-temple from still later. The alphabet is a lineal descendant from the Egypto-Phœnician. The earliest Hindú buildings were wooden: India had no architecture which could vie with those of Greece or monarchical Rome, much less with the mighty works of Egypt and Mesopotamia. The Hindú’s ‘iron-built’ cities were probably clay-walled settlements. His mythology was Egyptian tempered with Greek: for instance, the four Yugas or periods, in the fourth of which (Kali, the black Yuga) we now are. And considering how early Christianity found its way into the Peninsula, and the highly subjective and receptive nature of the people, I cannot but believe that they borrowed largely from the sacred writings of the stranger. It is easier to hold that Christ originated, or at least influenced, Krishna, than with Volney to hold Krishna the original of Christ. In 1852 Mr. Pocock wrote about ‘India in Greece’; in 1883 we want a change of venue to ‘Greece in India.’ ‘Yavana’ (Greek) entered India with Alexander, and this gives a _terminus a quo_ though not _ad quem_. CHAPTER XI. THE SWORD IN ANCIENT GREECE: HOMER; HESIOD AND HERODOTUS: MYCENÆ. ‘Homer and Hesiod,’ says Herodotus,[715] ‘lived, as I hold, not more than four hundred years before my time.’ This would date them between B.C. 880–830. The contemporaneity of the bards, their cousinship, and even their existence, has been copiously doubted: some place Hesiod before, others two hundred or three hundred years after— Blind Milesigenes thence Homer called; and we have come to look upon Homer as one of the Homeridæ, the _heros eponymus_ of the bards who produced the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey.’