r\ 



76 Eajendralala Mitra— On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India. [jj- . \ 



at midnight, and this perhaps may gi ve us some idea of the distance of the 

 two places. 



I do not think that I need add anything to these remarks except that 

 I had omitted to mention that Fernandez visited Ciandecan in October 1599 

 and got letters patent from the king. As an additional precaution, Fernandez 

 obtained permission from the king to have these letters also signed by the 

 king's son, who was then a boy of twelve years of age. The boy may have 

 been Udayaditya, and so he must have been only three or four years older 

 than Bamchandra Bai of Bakla. 



I must not omit to point out that the fact that Vikramaditya chose 

 Jessore as a safe retreat as the strongest possible evidence of the jungly 

 nature of the surrounding country. It is true it had been cultivated in the 

 previous century by Khanja 'Ali, but the experiment had proved a failure 

 and the land had in the time of his successor (?) Chand Khan relapsed into 

 jungle. 



To sum up, it seems to me that the Sundarbans have never been in a 

 more nourishing condition than they are in at present. I believe that large 

 parts of Bakirganj and Jessore were at one time cultivated, that they re- 

 lapsed into jungle, and that they have soon been cleared again, and I have 

 also no doubt that the courts of the kings of Bakla and of Ciandecan im- 

 parted some degree of splendour to the surrounding country. But I do not 

 believe that the gloomy Sundarbans on the surface of Jessore and Bakir- 

 ganj were ever well peopled or the sites of cities. 



On Human Sacrifices in Ancient India.— By Bajendealala Mitea, LL. D. 



Nothing can be more abhorrent to modern civilization than the idea of 

 slaughtering human victims for the propitiation of the great Father of the 

 universe ; yet, looking to the character of the different systems of religion 

 which governed the conscience of man in primitive times, it would by no 

 means be unreasonable to assume a priori that such an idea should have been 

 pretty common, if not universal. 



The tendency to assign human attributes to the Divinity was a marked 

 peculiarity in almost all systems of religion that then got into currency. 

 The ideal of God was derived from the concrete man. The attributes were 

 doubtless magnified manifold, but their character remained the same— they 

 differed only in degree, but not in kind. A being of unlimited power, of 

 profound erudition, of great subtlety, was what the untutored finite mind of 

 man could conceive in its aspirations to grasp the infinite ; and as those aspi- 



