[To this answer the translator, Babu P. C. Roy, appends the following notes among others. “The crutis speak of the cow as the only food, in the following sense. The cow gives milk. The milk gives butter. The butter is used in _Homa_. The Homa is the cause of the clouds. The clouds give rain. The rain makes the seeds to sprout forth and produce food. Nilakantha endeavours to explain this in a spiritual sense. There is, however, no need of such explanation here.”] [89] This sudden and rather unartistic introduction of the goddess Kali, unmentioned before, looks very much like a clumsy addition to the epic made at a comparatively modern date in the interests of the later developments of Hinduism. [90] The cook in the council chamber! This is a sample of the primitive ideas which underlie the epic. [91] “Mahabharata Udyoga Parva,” section clx. [92] “The plain of Kurukshetra,” says Mr. Talboys Wheeler, “is generally identified with the field of Panipat, which lies to the northwest of the modern city of Delhi. This plain is famous in modern history as being the site of two of the greatest and most decisive battles that have been fought in modern times. It was here that Baber, in +A.D.+ 1525, overthrew the Afghan rulers at Delhi and established the dynasty of the Moguls, and it was here in 1761 that Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Sovereign of Cabul, inflicted such a crushing blow upon the Mahrattas as indirectly cleared the way for the establishment of British supremacy.”--Note to Wheeler’s “History of India,” vol. i., p. 272. The identification of Panipat with Kurukshetra in the above passage is incorrect, and probably led to the disappointment experienced by Sir Edwin Arnold when he visited Panipat and found that the inhabitants of the place were ignorant of the history of Kurukshetra and its precise position (see his “India Revisited,” p. 193). It is near _Thanesar_ and not Panipat that the Brahmans find _Kurukshetra_, and the various incidents of the old story are associated with many spots in that locality. In Chapter III., entitled “The Sacred Land,” I have given some account of the modern aspects of Kurukshetra. [93] These are large numbers indeed, but the poet does not limit himself to them, and in one of his flights of imagination speaks of a hundred millions of warriors having been slain in ten days by a single hero (“Bhisma Parva,” section xiv.). In another moment of inspiration he places “a hundred millions and twenty thousand” cars in a certain strategical position on the field (“Bhisma Parva,” section l.). There is, in the “Mahabharata” generally, an affectation of precision in regard to numbers, as when the narrator informs us that such a one was hit with _three_ arrows, another with _four_, and a third with _seven_; but there is no attempt to preserve consistency, and, whenever the bard is so disposed, he revels without scruple in the biggest figures imaginable.