To this ascription of this learned traveller I most fully, most heartily respond. Pagoda is a name invented by the Portuguese, from the Persian “Peutgheda,” meaning a temple of idols, in which they supposed them to abound, but which in reality were only so many figures or symbols of the “principle of truth,” the “spirit of wisdom,” the “supreme essence,” and other attributes of the Godhead, which, I believe, they in a great measure spiritually recognised. Those structures, therefore, as the very word implies, had no manner of relation to the sacred fire, but they had to the sun and moon, the supposed authors of _generation_ and _nutrition_, of which fire was only the corrupt emblem; and the different forms of their constructural terminations, similar to those elsewhere described by Maundrell, some being _pointed_, and some being _truncated_, harmonises most aptly with the _radial_ and _hemispherical representations_ of the two celestial luminaries, as well as with that organ of human _procreation_ which we shall hereafter more particularly identify. These are the two Baals dwelt so largely upon in the Scriptures--Baal masculine, the sun, and Baal feminine, the moon, from both of which the Hindoos derive their fabulous origin. Indeed it was from their extreme veneration for the “queen of night” that they obtained their very name; Hindoo meaning, in the Sanscrit language, the moon; and accordingly we find among them Hindoo-buns, that is, children of the moon, as we do Surage-buns, children of the sun, the other parent of their fanciful extraction.