Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/90

80 rainbow. They exhibit all sorts of shape, size, and figure: in forms wholly human or half human, wholly brutal or variously compounded, like many-headed and many-bodied centaurs, with four, or ten, or a hundred or a thousand eyes, heads, and arms. They ride through the regions of space on all sorts of etherealized animals: elephants, buffaloes, lions, deer, sheep, goats, peacocks, vultures, geese, serpents, and rats! They hold forth in their multitudinous arms all manner of offensive and defensive weapons: thunderbolts, scimetars, javelins, spears, clubs, bows, arrows, shields, flags, and shells! They discharge all possible functions. There are gods of the heavens above, and of the earth below, and of the regions under the earth; gods of wisdom and of folly; gods of war and of peace; gods of good and of evil; gods of pleasure, who delight to shed around their votaries the fragrance of harmony and joy; gods of cruelty and wrath, whose thirst must be satiated with torrents of blood, and whose ears must be regaled with the shrieks and agonies of expiring victims. All the virtues and the vices of man, all the allotments of life—beauty, jollity, and sport, the hopes and fears of youth, the felicities and infelicities of manhood, the joys and sorrows of old age—all, all are placed under the presiding influence of superior powers.”—Duff's India.

The Geography and Astronomy of the Hindoos are on a par with their Theology. It would be a waste of time and patience to crowd these pages with their wild, ridiculous, and unscientific nonsense upon these topics. Yet it may be a duty to say something in order to convey a general idea of the subject to such persons as have not made their system a study. Dr. Duff has had the patience to epitomize it; and from him we quote a passage or two, which the reader will deem to be all sufficient, and which he may be assured is only a sample of the monstrous extravagances of Hindoo “science,” falsely so called.

Speaking of the constitution of the physical universe, as revealed in the Sacred Books of the Brahmins, he says: “It is partitioned into fourteen worlds—seven inferior, or below the world which we inhabit, and seven superior, consisting—with the exception of our