stituted hecatombs of slain animals for acts of piety, and who shed 

 torrents of bestial blood, while the tear of genuine sorrow never 

 streamed from the moistened eye, nor the sigh of agonizing remom 

 ever heaved the repentant bosom. The extravagant doctrine of the 

 Metempsychosis, incorporated with the purer principles of genuine 

 Buddhism, and the unbounded excess to which they were carried by 

 some of its votaries, only serve to display to us additional proofs of 

 the folly and imbecility of human nature, even in those who arro- 

 gate to themselves the distinguished title of philosophers, without the 

 aid of DIVINE itEVELATioN to direct and restrain it. 



The Avatar of Buddha has, not less than the others, a connection 

 with the astronomy of the Brahmins ; for, according to their Sabian 

 system of superstition, he is the planet Mercury ; being considered, in 

 the wild details that relate the sidereal genealogy of their gods, as 

 the son of CHANDRA, the Moon, a male deity in India, by his 

 favourite wife Ron INI, the bright star in the Bull, the Arabian 

 AiN-AL-TiiAuu and ALDEBAEAN of our sphere. From this cir- 

 cumstance of Chandra being his immediate progenitor, his de- 

 scendants in India are called Chandra-Bans, or Children of the 

 Moon, which we have seen is their second great dynasty, the first 

 being called Surya-Bans, from their solar descent, like the Heliadre 

 of Greece. I have already hinted, that, by the marriage of two 

 celestial bodies, the ancients meant no more than their accidental 

 conjunction ; and that as the nativity of great personages in India is 

 constantly cast by the attendant seers, the sum of the allegory may 

 imply that Buddha was bom when the moon was in conjunction 

 with Mercury in the sign Taurus, or was passing through the stars 

 which form the fourth lunar mansion, denominated in India Rohini. 

 Mercury is numbered in India among the beneficent planets. The 

 antiquity of this birth, or conjunction, or transit, or by whatever 

 name the reader may choose to denominate it, we have already seen 



