I need scarce remark that the title _asmáni_, “heavenly,” belongs exclusively to the superstitious admiration with which the Desátir is viewed. Nor are its fifteen books to be taken for sacred works of so many prophets who succeeded each other after such long intervals of time; yet nothing prevents us, as I hope to show, from believing some parts of them very ancient. Neither are these of the same antiquity. Thus, prophecies which are certainly interpolations made after the events, occur in them, not otherwise than in the Indian Puránas, the fundamental parts of which are nevertheless now admitted to be as ancient as the Vedas themselves. We find in the two last books of the Desátir are mentioned: the contest between the Abbasides and the descendants of Ali; the adoption of Muhammedism by almost the totality of Iran; inimical sects, and the power of the Turcomans superseding that of the Arabs; the latter parts must certainly have been composed after the taking of Bagdád by Hulogu in 1258 of our era. The fifteenth book of the Desátir is probably apocryphal. As to the doctrine of the Desátir, Erskine says:[67] “I consider that the whole of the peculiar doctrines, ascribed to Mahabad and Hoshang, is borrowed from the mystical doctrines of the Persian Súfis, and from the ascetic tenets and practices of the Yogis and Sanyasis, of India who drew many of their opinions from the Vedanta-school.” But this involves the great historical question, concerning the origin of Súfism and the whole Indian philosophy, which is by some (not without foundation) believed to have been spread throughout a great part of Asia. It is quite gratuitous, I may say, to regard them “as having had no existence before the time of Azar Kaivan[68] and his disciples in the reigns of Akbar and Jehanguir, and as having been devised and reduced into form between 200 and 300 years ago in the school of Sipasi-philosophers.” Nor can I admit as better founded the following insinuations of the same ingenious critic: “Nor shall I inquire whether many of the acute metaphysical remarks that abound in the commentary and the general style of argument which it employs have not rather proceeded from the schoolmen of the West, than directly from the Oriental or Aristotelian philosophy.” To this may be answered: It is highly problematic, whether the translator of the Desátir ever knew any schoolman of the West, but it is certain that he, as an Asiatic and a Persian, knew the Oriental philosophy, the fundamentals of which were preserved in the first books of the Desátir, as we have already said; but the commentator could but participate in the modification, which the ancient doctrine had undergone in his age, after its return from the West to the East, in translations of Greek philosophical works into Asiatic languages. Thus, in the Desátir and its commentary――I borrow the words of baron von Hammer:――“We see already germinating the double seed of reason and light, from which sprung up