of the stock of Kuru, whose name now passed over to the people, so that the Bharatas, who, in the Veda, are called Purus and Bharatas, are now called Kurus after their royal family. With the Bharatas, or soon after them, other Arian tribes advance to the Yamuna; here we meet in the Epos the tribes which, according to the Rigveda, once fought with the Bharatas against the Tritsus, the Matsyas, and the Yadavas, the latter lower down on the Yamuna. Hence we may conclude with tolerable certainty that the Bharatas, under the guidance of the Kurus, succeeded in driving further to the east the tribes which had previously emigrated in that direction--the Tritsus (_i.e._ the Koçalas), Angas, Videhas, and Magadhas (as they were afterwards called), and that it was the family of the Kurus who established the first extensive dominion among the Indians on the upper Ganges. It is the struggles of the tribes, who once in part united with the Bharatas, and followed them into the valley of Yamuna, against the kingdom of the Kurus which are described in the Mahabharata. Çantanu, the descendant of Kuru, had a son Bhishma, so we are told in this poem. When Çantanu was old he wished to marry a young wife, Satyavati; but her parents refused their consent, because the sons of their daughter could not inherit the throne. Then Bhishma vowed never to marry, and to give up his claim to the throne. Satyavati became the wife of Çantanu, and bore him two sons. The oldest of these Bhishma placed, after Çantanu's death, on the throne, and, when he fell in war, he placed the younger son, Vijitravirya, to whom he married two daughters of the king of the Kaçis, a people situated on the Ganges (in the neighbourhood of Varanasi or Benares). But the king died without children. Anxious that the race of Kuru should not die out, Satyavati bade the wise priest Vyasa, the son of her love, whom she had borne before her marriage with Çantanu, raise up children to the two widows of Vijitravirya. When the first widow saw the holy man approach by the light of the lamp, with knots in his hair, with flashing eyes, and bushy brows, she trembled and closed her eyes. The second widow became pale with fear; and so it befell that the son of the first, Dhritarashtra, was born blind, and the son of the second, Pandu, was a pale man. Bhishma took both under his care. He married Dhritarashtra to Gandhari, the daughter of the king of the Gandharas, on the Indus; for Pandu he chose the daughter of a prince of the Bodshas, Kunti; and with gold and precious stones, Bhishma also purchased for him a second wife, Madri, the sister of the prince of the Madras. As Dhritarashtra was blind, Bhishma made Pandu king of Hastinapura, and he became a mighty warrior; under him the kingdom was as powerful as under Bharata. But he loved hunting even more than war. He went with his wives to the Himalayas in order to hunt, and there he died at an early age. The blind Dhritarashtra now reigned over the Bharatas.