Page:Tudor Jenks--Imaginotions.djvu/19



N old manuscript recently discovered by a German professor seems to indicate a very early origin for the photographic camera.

The original text is in Sanskrit, and the translation is faithful in all respects. The preamble, as usual, recites the titles of the potentate who figures in the story, and I omit most of it. The first sentence, however, helps us to fix the date.

It ran thus: "In the period of rulers from the land over the sea, when the ice-bridge existed, in the times of the forefathers of the ancestors of the forerunners; in the reign of the great, wise, strongest-in-battle and swiftest-in-retreat, the outrunner-of-the-chariots-of-the-five-toed-horses, in the thirteenth period after the slaying of the next-to-last toothed bird"—and so on.

The references to the glacial period, to the original form of the present horse, and to the pterodactyl will convince any student of 1