Did Scletice originate in India ? SS* 



There is another series of conjectures, founded on an obscure 

 and unsupported hint of an Egyptian writer, and a few not well 

 defined coincidences of arts and institutions of some ancient na- 

 tions, and some acknowledged agreements in their languages, to 

 which we shall now direct our attention. 



In No. 16, p. 331, we are informed : " It is in India, accord- 

 ing to all appearance, that we are to look for the origin of the 

 sciences. It is in thai country, in fact, that the men who escaped 

 from the deluge must have established themselves. The loftiest 

 mountains of the globe, the chains of Himalaya and Thibet, 

 would afford them an asylum, and the bases of these mountains 

 would present them with the first cultivable land. * * The 

 priority of the Indians is farther shewn by a tradition to which 

 no attention seems hitherto to have been paid. It is, in fact, in 

 the extracts which have been preserved of the works of Mane- 

 tho, that, in the reign of Amenophis, a king of the I6th dynasty, 

 a colony came from India to settle in Ethiopia. Now Diodorus 

 Siculus, and all those who have written on the religion of Egypt,, 

 derive that religion from Ethiopia, or Upper Nubia. Thebes 

 itself was but an island, a colony of Meroe, which was the sacer- 

 dotal city of the Ethiopians. Thus, then, civilization came from 

 India into Nubia, and from Nubia into Egypt.'' We are then 

 informed, that among the Indians themselves we find no account 

 of the progress of science, which is conjectured to be owing to 

 the doctrinal point of the Brahmins, that history should not be 

 written, although, in the case of Egypt, the conjecture had 

 been, that science had been utterly lost, while we found history 

 in some measure preserved. We then have a notice of the In- 

 dian monuments, which are acknowledged not to be very an- 

 cient ; and of their most ancient books, the Vedas and Oupa- 

 vedas, both of the date of 1500 years before Christ, the former 

 containing an exposition of the religious philosophy of the In- 

 dians, the latter various scientific treatises, on music, medicine, 

 war, architecture, and the mechanical arts; and it is added, 

 " these two works are written in Sanscrit — a language which is 



and cylinder, inscribed in one another. Tlie otlier exception is Aristotle*s 

 Natural History of Animals, in which naturalists recognise not a little that 

 is valuable; but the valuable parts are obviously the work of his own mind, 

 and not borrowed from Kgypl or any other quarter- 



