The Indian name of Yogi is derived from the same word, which designates this philosophy. The Indian Yogi is a hermit or penitent who, absorbed in this mystic contemplation, remains often for years fixed immoveably to a single spot. In order to give a lively representation of a phenomenon so strange to us, which appears totally incredible and almost impossible, although it has been repeatedly attested by eye-witnesses, and is a well-ascertained historical fact; I will extract from the drama of Sacontalá by the poet Calidas, a description of a Yogi, remarkable for its vivid accuracy, or, to use the expression of the German commentator, its fearful beauty. King Dushmanta enquires of Indra's charioteer the sacred abode of him whom he seeks; and to this the charioteer replies:[53] "a little beyond the grove, where you see a pious Yogi, motionless as a pollard, holding his thick bushy hair and fixing his eyes on the solar orb. Mark:--his body is half covered with a white ant's edifice made of raised clay; the skin of a snake supplies the place of his sacerdotal thread, and part of it girds his loins; a number of knotty plants encircle and wound his neck; and surrounding birds' nests almost conceal his shoulders." We must not take this for the invention of fancy, or the exaggeration of a poet; the accuracy of this description is confirmed by the testimony of innumerable eye-witnesses, who recount the same fact, and in precisely similar colours. During that period of wonderful phenomena and supernatural powers--the first three centuries of the Christian church--we meet with only one Simon Stylites, or column-stander;--and his conduct is by no means held up by Christian writers as a model of imitation, but is regarded, at best, as an extraordinary exception permitted on certain special grounds. In the Indian forests and deserts, and in the neighbourhood of those holy places of pilgrimage mentioned above, there are many hundreds of these hermits--these strange human phenomena of the highest intellectual abstraction or delusion. Even the Greeks were acquainted with them, and, among so many other wonders, make mention of them in their description of India under the name of the Gymnosophists. Formerly such accounts would have been regarded as incredible and as exceeding the bounds of possibility; but such conjectures can be of no avail against historical facts repeatedly attested and undeniably proved. Now that men are better acquainted with the wonderful flexibility of human organization, and with those marvellous powers which slumber concealed within it, they are less disposed to form light and hasty decisions on phenomena of this description. The whole is indeed a magical intellectual self-exaltation, accomplished by the energy of the will concentrated on a single point: and this concentration of the mind, when carried to this excess, may lead not merely to a figurative, but to a real intellectual self-annihilation,