1855.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 177 



" la this fable we have no comparative data as to the size of the tor- 

 toise, but in. the Pythagorean cosmogony the infant world is represented 

 as having been placed on the back of an elephant, which was sustained on 

 a huge tortoise. It is in the Hindoo accounts, however, that we find the 

 fable most circumstantially told, and especially in what relates to the se- 

 cond Avatar of Vishnoo, when the ocean was churned by means of the 

 mountain Mundar placed on the back of the king of the tortoises, and the 

 serpent Basokee used for the churning-rope. Vishnoo was made to assume 

 the form of the tortoise and sustain the created world on his back to make 

 it stable. So completely has this fable been impressed on the faith of the 

 country, that the Hindoos to this day even believe that the world rests 

 on the back of a tortoise. Sir William Jones gives the following as a 

 translation from the great lyric poet Jyadeva : ' The earth stands firm on 

 thy immensely broad back, which grows larger from the callus occasioned 

 by bearing that vast burden. O Cesava ! assuming the body of a tortoise, 

 be victorious ! Oh ! Hurry, Lord of the Universe !' 



" The next occasion in Indian mythology where the tortoise figures 

 prominently is in the narratives of the feats of the bird-demigod ' Garuda,' 

 the carrier of Vishnoo. After stating the circumstances of his birth, and 

 the disputes between his mother Vinuta and ' Kudroo,' the mother of the 

 serpent, it is mentioned that he was sent on an expedition to bring 

 ' Chundra' the moon, from whom the serpents were to derive the water of 

 immortality. While pursuing his journey, amidst strange adventures, 

 Garuda met his father Kushgufa, who directed him to ' appease his hunger 

 at a certain lake, where an elephant and tortoise were fighting. The body 

 of the tortoise was eighty miles long — the elephant's 160. Gariida with 

 one claw seized the elephant — with the other the tortoise, and perched with 

 them on a tree 800 miles high.' He is then, after sundry adventures, 

 stated to have fled to a mountain on an uninhabited country, and finished 

 his repast on the tortoise and elephant. 



" In these three instances, taken from Pythagoras and the Hindoo 

 mythology, we have reference to a gigantic form of tortoise, comparable 

 in size with the elephant. Hence the question arises, are we to consider 

 the idea as a mere fiction of the imagination, like the Minotaur and the 

 chimsera, the griffin, the dragon, and the cartazonon, &c, or as founded 

 on some justifying reality ? The Greek and Persian monsters are com- 

 posed of fanciful and wild combinations of different portions of known 

 animals into impossible forms, and, as Cuvier fitly remarks, they are 

 merely the progeny of uncurbed imagination; but in the Indian eosmo- 

 gonic forms we may trace an image of congruity through the cloud of <\\ 

 2 a 2 



