formæ Deorum quemvis non aut hebetem, aut impium, Deos præsentes esse confiteri coegerunt.' Again: Præterea ipsorum Decrum sæpe præsentiæ, quales supra commemoravi, declarant ab hs et civitatibus, et singulis hominibus consuli.' What was said of the appearance of angels to men amongst the Hebrews, and t some other persons of other nations, was known to have been fact beyond the possibility of contradiction; and hence it came to pas that though philosophy suggested no such innovation, yet the di rectors of the sacra of the heathen kingdoms could not wel avoid an imitation of what, in fact, could not be denied to hav happened in the world; and this, by degrees, led them to thei new gods.

Now Sarah had an handmaid, an Egyptian, &c. Genesis, 16. 1 Polygamy was allowed among the Araucanians, with custom very similar to the patriarchal times. The first wife, who wa called Unendomo, was always respected as the real or legitimat one by all the others, who were called Inandomo, or secondary wives. She had the management of the domestic concerns, and regulated the interior of the house. The husband had much to do to maintain harmony amongst these women, who were not a little inclined to jealousy.-Molina's Chili, vol. ii. p. 116. And he dreamed, and behold, a ladder set upon the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven; and, behold, the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. Genesis, 28. 12.

In the cave of Mithra, in Persia, there was a representation of a ladder, with seven gates ascending to heaven, alluding probably to the doctrine of the sidereal metempsychosis, or perhaps of the soul through the several gradations to the supreme mansion of felicity. The representation of a ladder, however, as the gate of heaven, was not confined to the Mithraic mysteries of Persia. Mr. Maurice informs us,' that there was in the royal library at Paris a book of paintings, entirely allusive to the Indian mythology, in one of which was exhibited a sidereal ladder of seven gates, upon which the souls of men were represented ascending and descending.

And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it. Genesis, 28. 18.

From hence, probably, arose the pagan practice of consecrating certain sacred stones, called botyli, anointing them with odoriferous oils, and venerating them as divine oracles, into which the deity had deigned to descend. The Brahmins extracted from their most precious woods a rich essential oil, with the purest portion of which they anointed the idols they adored.

'Maurice, Indian Antiq. v. 2. 259.

And this stone which I have set for a pillar shall be God's house. Genesis, 28. 22.

It may be reasonably conjectured that the earliest temples or nemorials of the Deity were of this description. From Pliny we karn' that Mitres, an Egyptian king, called by Isidore,' Mesphres, vas the first person who erected obelisks or pyramidical stones in honor of the object of veneration. Tacitus tells us,3 that,

in the temple of Venus, at Cyprus, the image of the goddess is ot of human shape, but a circular figure, tapering gradually tom a broad base to a point, the reason of which is unknown.”+ The Apollo, according to Suidas, was nothing more with the Grecians than a column ending in a point. Pausanias informs s, that Jupiter, Melichius, and Diana Patroa were represented in early the same manner; and that in the ancient gymnasium of Megara there was a stone in the shape of a pyramid of no great nagnitude, called Apollo Carynus. The idol in the celebrated emple of Jaggernaut is an irregular pyramidical black stone. In he temple of Sumnaut there was an idol composed of one entire stone fifty cubits in height, forty-seven of which were buried in the ground, and on that spot, according to the Brahmins, he had been worshipped between 4 or 5000 years, a period beyond which, it is remarkable, they never venture to ascend; for it is a period at which their Cali, or present age, commences. It is, in short, the period of that flood, beyond which, Mr. Bryant previously observes, human records cannot ascend. On the coast of Canara several thousands of people, we are informed by Captain Hamilton, assemble in the middle of a grove, around a shapeless block of 3 or 400 weight, offering their vows, and burning incense before it. In the same manner the Arabians of Petra worshipped a black square pillar of a stone, without any figure or representation. This deity was called Theus, probably the same as Theuth, Thoth, or Taut, who was contemporary with Osiris, and to whom Sanchoniatho attributes the highest antiquity.

6

E. S..

Pliny, lib. 36. c. 8. 2 Isid. lib. 18. ch. 31.

3 Tacit. lib. 2. Hist.

+ Paus. lib. 1. c.44. lib. 2. c. 3. 5 Maurice, Indian Antiq. v. 3. p. 37. Hamilton, Voy. to E. Indies, v. 1. 274.

ON THE CONFORMITY

OF THE

GREEK, LATIN, AND SANSKRITA

LANGUAGES.

INTRODUCTION.

FROM ROM some primeval tongue, as from a centre, the various languages of the earth must probably have arisen, and the original roots of words are often found to have no longer any existence in an insulated state, but wrapped up in a derivation, or swathed in an affix or a suffix. We have an example in the word anurud, love, in Sanskrita, where the root is rud, and the affix anu, and in Greek avregws with the preposition, where the root is gws; and dipuk in Sanskrita, of which the root is dip, or dipu, and with the suffix k makes dipuk. This word has been a snare to some great men, who have supposed that the Latin term cupido, desire, has its origin in the Sanskrita word reversed, which, from the nature of its conformation, could not have been the case, because the two last letters are not necessary to the existence of the primitive, dip, inflame, or dipu, to which is added ka in its silent state, that is, when a is not sounded, and ka at the end of a word is often redundant. (Vid. p. 548. Wilkins.)

Wheresoever men have been originally dispersed, and in whatsoever direction, thither they carried with them their monosyllables, which 3000 became polysyllabic; and the original, clouded over like the silkworm, was lost in the obscurity of its own making. The progress of language may be compared to a river broken into streams, in which the contents originally existing in the whole, are no longer found in any one division, but must be looked for in the smaller or greater branches, changed indeed, and diversified by the nature of the soil, through which they have passed, or where they reside. Thus the habitation of a plant will alter its growth, and the sun and air will make a difference in an oriental, or an occidental mineral, as to external appearances, though the form and figure of it remain unchanged. In the Hebrew language, which, with the Arabic, Syriac, Chaldee, and Punic, proceeds from a common stock, as a variety of a primitive tongue, there is a number of words uniformly spelt, which have very opposite meanings, not to be reconciled to the original root, and must be explained by the aid of the sister dialects.

On the dispersion of mankind, the colonies that migrated to the North, East, and South, carried with them the whole collection of words which were required for their wants in their first habitations. These soon grew mightily; as new objects came to view, new names were wanted, and new ideas begat new expressions. Men first began to delineate what they wished to preserve in rude lines on leaves and on stones, which they improved into symbolic and imitative characters, that are still retained by the Chinese, to the perpetual exclusion of alphabetical letters, as yet perhaps undiscovered when the sons of Noah left Shinar.

In reducing languages to regiments, and marshalling them in their ́order, I should be inclined to bring all those from the same stock. whose letters follow one another in the same uniform series, with a similar identity both of numeral and vocal powers, which may fairly be said to be the case of the Samaritan, Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, and Greek alphabets. Should it be objected, that the upsilon of the Greeks, that is next to the tau, with the arithmetic note of 400, ought to have been the sixth letter, according to the Hebrew succession, with the numeral power of 6, and not 600; I answer, that the sixth place was at first filled with the character Sau, which had the numerical power of six; and that this character was not a mere numeral, appears from the distinction given by the Greeks to the letter T in the epithet psilon, which had been unnecessary, if no other character were set for a different sound of this letter. Now what other is there but bau for this purpose? the very form of it is not unlike the Hebrew vau reversed 5, and its name is nearly the same, so that the Greeks might probably have meant it for the literal as well as the numerical power of vau.

The insertion of various letters in the Persian and Arabic alphabets not to be found in the Hebrew, which letters have no numbers assigned to them, proves unequivocally that the numerical powers followed at first in the order of the letters, since of the 28 letters of the Arabians, and the 32 of the Persians, those which agree with the 22 of the Hebrews in their vocal, still correspond in their numerical powers, notwithstanding the difference of their place and situation in the alphabet.

It should appear then, and a conclusion may be inferred without much risk, that the origin of the Greek alphabet is m. kedem from the East, and it is said that Cadmus, whose name is made up of Kdın, with a Greek termination, at the head of a Phoenician colony, carried letters into Greece one hundred and sixty years before Homer and Hesiod, and about three hundred after the siege of Troy. These dates may be

uncertain, but we have a more fixed point concerning the age of Hesiod, who was not much older than Homer, if he were not his contemporary, and that is from his book of works and days, in which he directs the pruning of vines in Boeotia to be begun upon the rising of Arcturus at sun-set, sixty days after the winter solstice; and again all the grapes to be gathered, and the second vintage ended, when the same star rose at day-break from which account of the heliacal rising of Arcturus it follows, that Homer and Hesiod florished about 875 years before Christ.

Although Greece borrowed its letters from Syria and Palestine, yet is its form cast in an Asiatic mould, and derived from the same sources whence the language of the Sanskrita has arisen, that is found every where, more or less, from the China seas to the Persian gulph.

The mythology of the Hindoos agrees in a variety of particulars with the Greek, and the identity of Zeus and Siva, or Trilochan and Jupiter Triopthalmos, is manifest from Pausanias, who tells us, that a statue of the God with three eyes had been found as early as the taking of Troy.

The days of the week are also named from the same Gods in Sanskrita and in Greece. One source of language, customs, and worship, seems to have been common to both.

The Vedas, the oldest of any Sanskrita compositions, that is, the three first, (the fourth, which mentions Krishna, is of a very inferior date,) are in the ancient dialect, and very difficult and obscure. They are allowed, however, by all, to fall short of the age of Moses, and by some to promise small reward to the reader, and less to the translator. The more modern Sanskrita has, indeed, been hammered into shape, pared, as it were, with the knife, and levelled with the ruler, till it has become hard to use, and difficult to acquire from its long trains of exceptions and anomalies. The alphabet of this language is so perfect, that with small practice you may read it; but to speak or write it you must know all the changes of letters that open on one another in forming a single word or sentence, the permutations of all vowels, and the coalition of all consonants; it was thus that Isocrates formed his style, póvov od parrot, as it were, with files and hammers; and so fastidious was he, that vowels opening on one another gave him, like the nervous Sybarite at the sight of a spade, a pain in his side. The ages of the Vedas and Puranas is now no longer considered as unfathomable; the former appear to have existed before the siege of Troy the latter, in their present state, are probably two thousand years later, if we may judge by an astronomical observation made of the rising of Canopus heliacally in two of them. As. Res. V. v. p. 244.

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