I shall say a few words only as to Buddhism, and these will relate first to orthography; it is necessary to distinguish between the words Buddha and Budha, which are often confounded; they have nothing in common but their roots. Buddha with two _ds_ is a participle of _budh_ which means awakened, or enlightened with a special light; this name is given to those who have attained the highest degree of human wisdom; Budha with one _d_ is simply a wise man; and when the Hindoos taught the Greeks a knowledge of the planets, they gave this name to the planet Mercury. The custom of immolating the widow on the funeral pile of her dead husband is naturally spoken of with astonishment and horror; for many centuries neither the Hindoos nor Europeans knew that it arose from a mistaken interpretation of some lines in the Veda. At last a time arrived when the Brahmans, who were the religious nobility of the country and had the control of the Vedic religion, pretended that each word of the Veda had been supernaturally revealed; voices were now raised in protest against this affirmation; the Hindoo people, who submitted patiently to the yoke of political despotism, would not permit a monopoly of the teaching of eternal truths; and to shake the authority of the clergy it was quite sufficient for one man to step forth from amongst the multitude and assert that it was possible to obtain eternal happiness without the intervention of the Brahmanic priesthood, and without a blindfold faith in the books on which they had placed the seal of infallibility. Five hundred years before our present era this man appeared, the son of a king, of the warrior caste, not belonging to the Brahman class; he was Gautama Sâkya-Muni, known to the entire world afterwards as the Buddha. He claimed the right of giving instruction, and handed it on to others who were also enlightened. Two hundred years after his death, the famous king Asoka convened a great council in order to determine the various points of doctrine; and his edicts were engraved in the Sanscrit dialect then in use, on rocks in various parts of his kingdom. If the teaching of Buddha awakened such an ardent sympathy amongst men, and was propagated with so much rapidity, it was owing to the fact that the Hindoo mind had been prepared to receive it by centuries of meditation. In all probability it was not Buddha who coined the term Nirvâna; he may have found it ready made in the Upanishads, where it meant originally not annihilation of the soul, or absorption, but a “blowing out, an extinction,” then an extinction of passions, a final moral emancipation, and the union of the individual soul with eternal truth.