immigrants, and the least intermixture took place with the ancient population. It is due rather to the fact that in these regions the civilisation and culture of the Indians were consolidated in an especial degree; here the priestly reform of the religion, if it did not receive the first impulse, yet acquired the victory and became supreme, owing perhaps to the support of the princes of the dynasty of Pandu, who reigned at Kauçambi. As these were the regions in which the priests first regulated the ancient customs of worship, morals, and justice according to the new doctrine, they could afterwards serve as a pattern for all the rest. If the Brahmans, soon after they had succeeded in carrying through their demands here, revised the Epos of the great war in the light of their new system, they could claim the thanks of the kings of the Bharatas for their support, they could show that the kings who in ancient times had won the dominion in these lands, the ancestors of the race then on the throne, had even in early times obediently followed the commands of the priests, and they could set up the conquerors in that struggle as patterns of the proper conduct of kings to Brahmans (p. 101). Hence we may perhaps assume that it was in the districts on the upper Yamuna and the upper Ganges that the priesthood first got the upper hand, and the same change followed in the lands still further to the east, after the great priestly families, with more or less difficulty, delay and completeness, established themselves among the Kshatriyas of these districts--the Vasishthas with the kings of the Koçalas, the Gautamas with the kings of the Videhas, to whom no doubt they made very clear the services their forefathers had rendered to the predecessors on the throne. According as the previous circumstances offered more resistance in one place, and less in another, the new system was sometimes carried out more rapidly and thoroughly, and at others more slowly and with less severity. No historical tradition has come down to us of the resistance made by the nobles to the priestly order in defence of their possession, or by the kings in questions affecting their power. It was the interest of the Brahmans to establish and describe the position they had won by conquest as occupied by them from the first. No nation has gone so far as the Indians in their eagerness to forget the old condition of affairs in every succeeding evolution, and to establish the new point of view as one existing from the first. The liveliness and force of their fancy must have unconsciously led them to regard the new and the present as the old and the original after comparatively short intervals of time.