[140] Lucretius, V. v. 282: Largus item liquidi fons luminis, æthereus sol, Irrigat assiduè cœlum candore recenti. [141] Sir W. J., Works, vol. III. p. 127. [142] Vol. II. pp. 246-288. [143] See _Mœurs, Institutions et Cérémonies des Peuples de l’Inde; par M. l’abbé J. A. Dubois, ci-devant missionnaire dans le Meissour_. Paris, 1825. This work was first published in the English language, London, 1816. It had been translated from the author’s French manuscript, which lord William Bentinck, governor of Madras, purchased on the account of the East India Company, in 1807. This composition received the approbation of major Wilks, resident of Maissour, sir James Mackintosh, and William Erskine, Esq.; to which I am happy to add the most decisive judgment of the honorably-known Brahman, Ram Mohun Roy, whom I often heard say: “The European who best knew the Hindus, and gave the most faithful account of them, was the abbé Dubois.” [144] See vol. II. p. 201. [145] The celebrated Ram Mohun Roy had abandoned all the tenets, but remained as much as possible attached to the customs, of his Brahminical caste. [146] His Works, vol. IV. p. 16. § V.――RETROSPECT OF THE PERSIAN AND INDIAN RELIGIONS. I have endeavored to trace the most remarkable features of Persian and Indian religions from among those which are contained in the Dabistán. In them we recognise resemblances, and, in more than one point, even coincidences, which appear not merely taken from each other in the course of time, but rather originally inwoven in the respective institutions. This may be explained, partly by the general probability that nations, passing through the same stages of civilisation, might agree in several parts of religion, politics, and philosophy, and chiefly by the fact, now generally admitted among the learned,[147] that in very remote times, a union of all the Arian nations, among whom the Persians and Indians are counted, existed in the common regions of central Asia. Sir W. Jones[148] goes so far as to say: “We cannot doubt that the book of Mahabad, or Manu, written in a celestial dialect, means the Veda.” William von Schlegel most ingeniously surmises,[149] “that the name of _Zand_ may be but a corruption of the Sanscrit word _chhandas_, one of the most usual names of the Vedas.” The fourteen Mahabadians are to him: “Nothing else but the fourteen Manus, past and future, of the Brahmanical mythology.”[150] Thus we should have to thank Mohsan Fani for a confirmation of the above-stated historical fact; the _Mahabadians_ were nothing else but _Mahabodhis_, in good Sanscrit, “great deified teachers;” he would have placed them, as did lately Burnouf, Lassen, and Charles Ritter, somewhere on the highlands of Iran, and he _invented_ nothing.