﻿j X 6 ON THE CHRONOLOGY | 



The aggregate of their four ages they call a divine 

 age, and believe that, in every thousand such ages, 

 or in every day of Brahma, fourteen Menas are suc- 

 cessively invested by him with the sovereignty of the 

 earth : each Menu, they suppose, transmits his empire 

 to his sons and grandsons during a period of seventy- 

 one divine ages ; and such a period they name & 

 Manwantara ; but, since fourteen multiplied by 

 seventy-one are not quite a thousand, we must conclude 

 that six divine ages are allowed for intervals between 

 the Manwantaras, or for the twilight of Brahma\ 

 day. '1 hirty such days, or Calpas, constitute, in their 

 opinion, a month of Brahma ; twelve such months, 

 one of his years j and an hundred such years, his 

 age; of which age they assert, that fifty years have 

 elapsed. We are now then, according to the Hindus 

 in the first day or Calf a of the first month of the 

 fifty-first year of Brahma's age, and in the twenty- 

 eighth divine age of the seventh Manwantara, of 

 which divine age the three first human ages have 

 passed, and four thousand eight hundred and eighty- 

 eight of the fourth. 



In the present day of Brahma the first Menu was 

 surnamed Sivayambhuva, or son of the self -existent ; 

 and it is he by whom the institutes of religious and 

 civil duties are supposed to have been delivered. In 

 his time the Deity descended at a sacrifice, and, by 

 his wife Satarupa, he had two distinguished sons, 

 and three daughters. This pair were created for the 

 multiplication of the human species, after that new 

 creation of the world which the Brahmans call Pad- 

 macatyiya, or the jLo/<w-creation. 



If it were worth while to calculate the age of 

 Menu's institutes, according to the Brahmans, we 

 must multiply four million three hundred and twenty 

 thousand by six times seventy-one, and add to the 



