THEORY OF THE EARTH. 155 



volutions which have affected the globe, as 

 their theology has in some measure consecrated 

 certain successive destructions which its surface 

 has already undergone, and is still doomed to ex- 

 perience ; and they only carry back the last of 

 those, which have already happened, about five 

 thousand years;* besides which, one of these revo- 

 lutions is described in terms nearly corresponding 

 with the account given by Moses.f It is also very 

 remarkable, that the epoch at which they fix the 

 commencement of the reigns of their first human 

 sovereigns, of the race of the Sun and Moon, is 

 nearly the same at which the ancient authors of 

 the west have placed the origin of the Assyrian 

 monarchy, or about four thousand years ago. 



* Voyage to India by M Le Gentil, I. 235. Bentley in the Calcut- 

 ta Memoirs, vol. IX. p. 222. Paterson, in ditto, ibid. p. 86. 



f Sir William Jones, in the Calcutta Memoirs, French translation, 

 vol. I. p. 170. 



The English reader may be gratified by the following extract from 

 this dissertation of Sir William Jones. Transl. 



"We may fix the time of Buddah, or the ninth great incarnation of 

 Vishnu, in the year 1014 before the birth of Christ. The Cashmi- 

 rians, who boast of his descent in their kingdom, assert that he appeared 



on earth about two centuries after Crishna, the Indian Apollo 



We have therefore determined another interesting epoch, by fix. 

 ing the age of Crishna near the year 1214, before Christ. As the three 

 first avatars or descents of Vishnu, relate no less clearly to an Univer- 

 sal Deluge, in which eight persons only were saved, than the fourth 

 and fifth do to the punishment of impiety and the humiliation of the 

 proud ; we may for the present assume that the second, or silver age 

 of the Hindus, was subsequent to the dispersion from Babel; so that 

 we have only a dark interval of about a thousand years, which were 

 employed in the settlement of nations, and the cultivation of civi- 

 lized society."- Works of Sir William Jones, I, 29, 4to. London, 1799. 



