Many unbelievers in this, and the old world, who have set themselves against our Bible, have indorsed the Vedas as scientific, without so much as having read or known one line in them. These Vedas profess to go back through _maha yugs_ of 4,320,000 years of men. A thousand of these _maha_ yugs, or 4,320,000,000 of years make a _kalpa_, or one day of the life of Brahma, and his night is of equal length; a hundred such days and nights measure the time of his life. These books give, as facts, seven great continents, separated by that many rivers and seven mountain-chains four hundred thousand miles high. They record a hundred sons to one king, ten thousand to another, and sixty thousand to another. These kings were in no danger from violating the command to “multiply and replenish the earth;” but there is one difficulty, at least, about the records concerning the seventy thousand and one hundred sons born to these three kings, and that is this, the records say: They were all born in a pumpkin and nourished in pans of milk, reduced to ashes by the curse of a sage, and restored to life by the waters of the Ganges. Those same sacred books say: The moon is fifty thousand leagues higher than the sun, and that it shines by its own light and animates our body; they say, the sun goes behind the Someyra Mountains and this makes the night; they say, these mountains are many thousand miles high, and are situated in the middle of our earth; they say, our earth is flat and triangular, having seven stories, each one of peculiar beauty, having its own inhabitants, and each one having a sea. The first story of earth, they say, is composed of _honey_, the second is composed of _sugar_, the third of _butter_, the fourth of _wine_; and the whole thing is carried upon the heads of elephants, and when these shake themselves earthquakes are produced. Among the astronomical calculations which confirm all this there are accounts of floods of waters rising to the Polar star. How is that for a flood?