While there are innumerable poetic legends--of which Spence Hardy's "Manual of Buddhism" is a great storehouse, and many of which are given by Arnold in his beautiful poem--strewn thick along the track of Buddhist literature, constantly tempting one to leave the straight path of the development of a great religion, I have carefully avoided what did not commend itself to my mind as either historical or spiritual truth. It was my original design to follow the wonderful career of Buddha until his long life closed with visions of the golden city much as described in Revelation, and then to follow that most wonderful career of Buddhist missions, not only through India and Ceylon, but to Palestine, Greece and Egypt, and over the table-lands of Asia and through the Chinese Empire to Japan, and thence by the black stream to Mexico and Central America, and then to follow the wise men of the East until the Light of the world dawned on them on the plains of Bethlehem--a task but half accomplished, which I shall yet complete if life and strength are spared. A valued literary friend suggests that the social life described in the following pages is too much like ours, but why should their daily life and social customs be greatly different from ours? The Aryan migrations to India and to Europe were in large masses, of course taking their social customs, or as the Romans would say, their household gods, with them. What wonder, then, that the home as Tacitus describes it in the "Wilds of Germany" was substantially what Mueller finds from the very structure of the Sanscrit and European languages it must have been in Bactria, the common cradle of the Aryan race. There can scarcely be a doubt that twenty-five hundred years ago the daily life and social customs in the north of India, which had been under undisputed Aryan control long enough for the Sanscrit language to spring up, come to perfection and finally become obsolete, were more like ours than like those of modern India after the, many--and especially the Mohammedan--conquests and after centuries of oppression and alien rule. If a thousand English-speaking Aryans should now be placed on some distant island, how much would their social customs and even amusements differ from ours in a hundred years? Only so far as changed climate and surrounding's compelled. I give as an introduction an outline of the golden, silver, brazen and iron ages, as described by the ancient poets and believed in by all antiquity, as it was in the very depths of the darkness of the iron age that our great light appeared in Northern India. The very denseness of the darkness of the age in which he came makes the clearness of the light more wonderful, and accounts for the joy with which it was received and the rapidity with which it spread.