the solar year being undetermined or disregarded, the revolutions by which time was counted were perpetually changing, and consequently present those anomalies which have appeared irreconcileable with reason and truth.

Major Wilford places the beginning of the astronomical and unchangeable Cali Yug * at 3100 years before Christ †, but its commencement as a civil or historical period is by no means agreed upon, though there are reasons for placing it about 1370 before Christ, when Yud'hishthira, Minos, and Crishna lived ‡.

The æras used in more modern times are those of Vicramaditya, beginning 56 years before Christ, and of Salivahana whose period commences seventy-eight years after the Christian æra. The history of the two extraordinary personages who gave names to these periods is enveloped in fables and contradictions which can only be plausibly explained by the supposition of several persons of the same name whose history has been confused.

Major Wilford mentions four Vicramadityas whose histories appear to be a mass of heterogeneous legends taken from the apocryphal gospel of the infancy of Christ, the tales of the Talmud concerning Solomon, and some of the Persian history of the Sassanian kings.

Vicramaditya was a king of Ogein, who made a desperate tapassya* in order to obtain long life from the goddess Kali; but as she seemed deaf to him he prepared to cut off his own head, when she interposed and granted him the empire of the world, till the appearance of a divine child, who was to be born of a virgin, and whose father was to be a carpenter, when he was to be deprived of his crown and life, in the year of the Cali yug 3101, answering to the beginning of the Christian æra. Vicramaditya after this promise lived surrounded by pleasures for a thousand years, when, remembering the prophecy, he sent messengers to seek the wonder

ful child, and followed with an army to destroy him; but the young Salivahana then five years old defeated and slew the longlived votary of Cali, and established his own æra instead of that of his rival.

Another account of Vicrama makes him live only one hundred and forty-five years, during all which time he waged war with the Romacas or Romans, and took one of their emperors prisoner, whom he dragged in triumph through the streets of Ogein, which tale is probably founded on the imprisonment of the emperor Valerian by the Persian prince Shapour. The Vicrama cotemporary with Solomon is like him said to have discovered the great muntra or spell by which he ruled the elements and subjected the spirits and genii.

But the great features in which all the histories of these Vicramas agree is the war with the divine child king Salivahana, and the tapass to Cali, at whose feet on the least fit of ill-humour they cast their heads, which are then picked up and replaced on the trunk by an attendant spirit, who however, as every body knows, is only empowered to perform this service ten times. The last Vicrama however appears really to be a distinct person, whose true name was Bhoja. It is doubted whether this is not the king whose court Calidasa and his learned cotemporaries adorned, but most Orientalists seem of opinion