We should transport ourselves in imagination to the age of the Patriarchs, and then consider that, with the high powers which they still possessed, they must have watched with the most jealous and far-sighted solicitude over the fate of their posterity, in order to preserve them in their original purity and high hereditary dignity. The Indian traditions acknowledge and revere the succession of the first ancestors of mankind, or the holy Patriarchs of the primitive world, under the name of the seven great _Rishis_, or sages of hoary antiquity; though they invest their history with a cloud of fictions. They place all these Patriarchs in the primitive world, and assign them to the race of Brahmins;--a circumstance which cannot here appear unfitting. It has been often observed that the Indians have no regular histories, no works of real historical science; and the reason is that with them the sense of the primitive world is still fresh and lively, and that not only do they clothe their ideas in a poetical garb, but all their conceptions of human affairs and events are exclusively mythological; so that all the real events of later historical times are absorbed in the element of mythology, or at least strongly tinged with its colours. It is in the same way, the Panegyrists of the Chinese language remark that the almost total absence of grammar in that language, among a people of such highly cultivated intellect, should not be taken merely to denote the poverty and jejuneness of the infancy of speech, as this in a great measure originated in the fact that the profound primitive emotions, which gave birth to those first languages, were too absorbed in the subject of their contemplation, too much bent on giving utterance to the most effective word, or expressing themselves with the most condensed brevity, to perplex or trouble themselves with nicer distinctions, and minor and often superfluous rules.