From the earliest ages known to the writers of the “Ramayana” and “Mahabharata” cremation of the dead has been the practice in India. Hence in Indian archæology we are deprived of those sources of information--graves, tumuli, cromlechs and sepulchres--which elsewhere, as in Egypt, have furnished such a wealth of facts regarding the earlier races of mankind. The sacred character of the Brahmans receives abundant recognition in the Epics; and it is noteworthy that, except in the relinquishment of animal food and vinous drinks by a great majority of the Hindus, little change has taken place in the social habits of the people since the heroic age depicted in the Epics. We need not doubt, however, that the abstention from animal food and, with it, from wine and spirits of all kinds has, in the course of many generations, profoundly modified the national character; and has, perhaps, more than anything else, gradually converted the turbulent, aggressive Aryan into the mild and contemplative Hindu.[141] A high degree of culture had doubtless been attained by the Indians before the Epics were cast into their present forms. The industrial arts would seem to have flourished, and we have seen how highly the poets appreciated and enjoyed the beauty of the woodlands, and how much they were impressed with the scenery of their grand mountains. This in itself is a remarkable fact, as the charms of landscape beauty do not seem to have been realized in the West until a somewhat later time. The ideal of human (particularly female) beauty which possessed the minds of the Hindu bards has been indicated by several allusions and quotations in the preceding chapters. It is certainly not that embodied in the Venus of Melos or the Apollo Belvedere; but every age and country has its own ideals. Throughout the foregoing brief narrative there has been ample evidence of the height to which the speculative imagination of the Hindus had carried them in endeavouring to read the riddle of human destiny, and notably so in the subtle pantheism of the “Bhagavatgita,” a work which, even if the date assigned to it by European scholars be accepted, and with that its authors’ supposed acquaintance with Christian ideas, must still excite our admiration by its largeness of conception and liberality of sentiments--expressed many centuries before Luther nailed his famous ninety-five theses upon the door of the church at Wittenberg.