248 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



prince of a territory in northern India, named Siddartha, was led to 

 ttke the lead therein. He was a Ivshatrya by caste. Meditating on 

 the system of classes he saw around him, he became a pessimist, and, 

 while adopting the Vedic cosmogony, with its doctrine of re-incamation, 

 he seized on the central idea of the power of thought, and inculcated 

 charity, patience, knowledge, courage, contemplation, as means of 

 becoming indifferent to semsual pains and pleasures, and ultimately, after 

 a variety of transmigrations, reaching a state of Nirvana, or absolute 

 escape from existence — which, if existence be an evil, must be the 

 summum bonum. 



Siddartha died in the fifth century before Christ, so the rebellion 

 he headed was only " in the air " when Pythagoras visited India, and, 

 however fascinating the study of the Buddhist system may be, with 

 its many parallels to Christianity, with a greater number of adher- 

 ents than any other faith, it does not bear on the present thesis except 

 as proving the firm belief of the Indian population in metempsychosis. 

 Absolute and immediate extinction would otherwise have been the logical 

 revolutionary doctrine. This Sakya, we may note, had a band of dis- 

 ciples who lamented his death, honoured him afterwards, and their 

 successors deified him. Superstition affirmed that he had no physical 

 body, no bones or bloo'd; it was a spiritual body only. Buddhism 

 spread with great rapidity, owing to its monastic system; it had become 

 powerful before Alexander and his Macedonians crossed the Indus. It is 

 of some interest to observe how admission to the society it created was 

 regulated; it was a community as to goods, resembling in this the 

 early Christian practice. It has been crushed in India proper by the 

 persistence of the Brahmins and the proselytizing fervour of the 

 Moslems. 



The Assyrian cosmogony is a rather complicated matter to unravel. 

 We have a tablet found in the library of King Assurbanipal, which 

 gives the following account: — 



" When as yet the heaven above and the earth beneath was not named, 

 " and the primeval ocean who begot them and Tlamat (chaos) who bore 

 "them mingled their waters: when no land was yet formed, no seed was 

 " visible, and the Gods had called nothing into being; when no name was 

 " named, no fate fixed, the Gods were created, Lukmu and Lakan were 

 " called into being. Ages passed and then Apshar and Kishar were created. 

 " Long were the days before other Gods came forth. Then did Apsu and 

 " Tlamat rebel against their rule, and Tlamat gave birth to a brood of 

 " monsters, to wage war upon them. The news was carried to the chief of 

 "the newly-born Gods, who ordered them to go forth against Tlamat and 

 "her brood, but they would not. At length Marduk came forward and was 

 "endowed with great strength and invincible weapons, who met and slew 



