152 THEORY OF THE EARTH. 



periods, and by different authors, and not less 

 extravagant in their fictions than the great poems. 

 It has been imagined that, in some of these writ- 

 ings, events and names of men bearing some re- 

 semblance to those spoken of by the Greeks and 

 Latins, might be discovered ; and it is chiefly 

 from these resemblances of names that Mr Wil- 

 fort has attempted to extract from the Pouranas 

 a kind of concordance with our ancient chrono- 

 logy of the west ; a concordance which, in every 

 line, betrays the hypothetical nature of its basis, 

 and which, moreover, can only be admitted by 

 absolutely rejecting the dates given in the Poura- 

 nas themselves *. 



The list of kings which the Indian pundits or 

 doctors pretend to have compiled according to 

 these Pouranas, are nothing but mere catalogues 

 without any details, or adorned with absurd ones, 

 like those of the Chaldeans and Egyptians, and 

 like those which Trithemus and Saxo Gramma- 

 ticus have made up for the northern nations f . 



! ^ 



'-wj 



* See the elaborate Memoir of Mr Wilfort, on the chrono- 

 logy of the kings of Magadha, and the Indian emperors, and 

 on the epochs of Vicramaditya or Bikermadjit, and Saliva- 

 hanria, in the Calcutta Memoirs, vol. ix. p. 82. 8vo. edit. 



t See Sir William Jones on the chronology of the Hin- 

 doos. Calcutta Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 111. See also Wilfort 



' ' 



