crepant chronologies of the northern and southern Buddhists, and testing them by what extraneous evidence we have, places Buddha's death 540 B.C., and therefore his birth, 660 в.c. Weber, however, whose tendency seems to be to diminish the antiquity of every thing Indian later than the Vêdas, places his death 370 B.C.; and therefore, we must suppose, discredits the list of kings who have to intervene between Ajâtaçatru and Candragupta.

After Candragupta's son, Vindusâra (291-263 B.C.), reigned the celebrated Buddhist king Açôka II., called on inscriptions Piyadasi. His reign lasted till 226 B.C., and in it was held the third Buddhistic synod, 246 B.C. The empire, the nucleus of which was Magadha, now extended over the greater part of India except the Dekhan: it included Râshtrika (Guzerat), Côla, Pida, and Kalinga (extending down the Coromandel coast), Gandhara (in the Penjab), and Kambôga (west of the Indus); and he conquered Kaçmira (Cashmeer). His inscriptions, which have been mentioned before, afford another fixed point in the chronology; for they name as contemporary kings Antiochus II., the Seleucid, who died 247 B.C.; Ptolemy II., Philadelphus, who died 246 B.C.; and Antigonus Gonatas, who died 239 B.C.

The empire of Açóka fell asunder after his death; and a King Pushpamitra, who founded the Çunga dynasty about 178 B.C., we are told, persecuted Buddhists; so early begins the counter-movement. He reunited, however, a large part of Açóka's dominions under his sway, and his dynasty expired in 66 B.C. The Simha dynasty, which bore rule in Râshtrika, with Simhapura (near Ahmedabad) for a capital, is known only by the evidence of coins and one inscription; yet it appears to have Fossessed a powerful empire in the west and north-west of India. It subsisted from 157-67 B.C., and is remarkable as apparently tributary to the Greek kings of Bactria. The chief interest attaching to the discovery of this dynasty is, that it fills up a gap, and prepares the way for a king whose memory has never been suffered to perish, but whose antecedents were utterly unknownVikramaditya, king of Mâlava, whose capital, Ujjayinî (Ougein), was the home of poetry and romance, attracted thither by the monarch's liberality. This king commenced his reign in 57 B.C., and appears to have conquered Kaçmîra and Surâshtra (Guzerat, Cattiwar), and probably the Penjâb; his great popularity is believed to have arisen from victories which delivered India from the yoke of the Indo-Scythians (Çaka). The poet Kâlidâsa, the author of Çakuntala and other still-existing plays and lyric poems, which are the true gems of Sanskrit literature, is said to have been one of the nine jewels in King Vikramaditya's crown, and this has hitherto been one of the few sheet-anchors in Indian

literature, that might be held to while all other dates went drifting. But Lassen and Weber show the insufficiency of the grounds on which this has been held, and even its incredibility; the former assigning the poet to the second half of the second century of the Christian era, and the latter apparently leaning to a considerably later date. This correction of the chronology, as Weber well observes, makes it no longer certain, as Sir W. Jones believed, that the Indian drama is perfectly indigenous; it may have been learned from the Greek-Bactrian kings, upon and even within the frontiers of India; more especially as the Indian dramas are discovered to belong to the west of India, and most of all to Mâlava, which formed a part of the dominions held by the Simha viceroys under the Greeks. Still, even if the Hindus should have received their first idea of the drama from scenic representations at the court of the Greek kings, it cannot be denied that they have so transformed it that the finished Indian play bears a very indigenous impress, and betrays nothing of its origin. The Greek play was a religious ceremony performed in honour of Dionysus; the Sanskrit is a purely secular amusement, to which, indeed, solemnity is given by the invocation of a god at the commencement, but which bears no relation to any worship. The Sanskrit play knows nothing of the unities, nor of a limitation in the number of actors. Indeed its freedom of construction reminds one much more of the English drama than of the Greek. The use of the popular dialects for the speech of persons of inferior rank, moreover, may be compared with the Welsh pronunciation of Fluellen and Sir Hugh Evans; and the free employment of prose or verse according to the elevation of the theme, reminds one more of the modern opera than of the Greek drama.

After Vikramaditya's son, who reigned till about the commencement of our era, darkness again obscures the picture; through which, by the dim light afforded by coins, we discover that India is divided among a multitude of not very powerful rulers, and that a foreign and barbarian power, the Indo-Scythian (Yu-chi), reigns in Kaçmira. This dynasty is represented between A.D. 10 and 40 by a prince of brilliant fame and great ability, Kanerki, or Kanishka, who to a greatly extended empire in India united a vast one in Central Asia. His ancestors had wavered between Mithraic, Caiva, and Buddhist worship. Kanerki, at first repelling Buddhism, became a convert, and enthusiastic for the spread of his new faith. Under him the fourth and last great Buddhistic synod was held in Kaçmîra; convents, colleges, and chaityas, were founded, and missionaries sent out. The other Indian rulers of this age were sometimes

Buddhistic, and sometimes Brahmanical; but Buddhism was fast losing ground.

We next come to the important dynasty of the Gupta kings. Their sway lasted from 150-318 A.D., and was the most glorious ever wielded by native princes in India. Their capital was probably Sâkêta (Ayodhya, Oude), and their original domains east of the Ganges. They are said to have been Vaiçyas (of the third caste); which, being quite contrary to the code, implies a kind of social revolution, whereby the lower classes seized upon the privileges of the higher. Although Brahmanical in religion, and giving through their personal influence an impulse to Brahmanism, they accorded an enlightened toleration to Buddhists. The first king, Gupta, had probably been the satrap of a king Vikramaditya, who founded an empire at Crâvastî about 150 A.D.; and either he or his son Ghatotkaca made himself independent. The third king, Candragupta I. (crowned 168 A.D.), extended his dominions, and took Eastern Mâlava. Samudragupta (crowned 195 A.D.) made all Northern India as far as Bengal tributary; and was evidently as politic as he was great, his system being to confirm the princes of Northern India, a mountainous and easily defensible region, in their possessions, at the same time making them tributary to himself; and to let the princes of the Dekhan, a region still more inaccessible to conquest, simply feel his power, and to encourage them to resort to him for the settlement of their disputes. He was a great patron of the fine arts and letters; and to his reign, perhaps the most brilliant period of Sanskrit literature, are probably to be referred many of the poets and poems currently ascribed to that of Vikramaditya. His son, Candragupta II. (crowned 235 A.D.), added Kaçmíra to his empire; and Candragupta's son, Kumaragupta, or Skandagupta (reigned 240-270 A.D.), also Surâshtra; after whom the empire apparently declined, and events (including a short usurpation of independence at Pâtaliputra) are obscure, until in 319 the Guptas are supplanted by the Bâllabhi dynasty in Guzerat. Upon the next age we have not space to enter; nor would it be easy to give of it even as slight a sketch as the foregoing, deprived as we are at this point of the guidance of Professor Lassen.

ART. V.-THE PHASIS OF FORCE.

The Correlation of Physical Forces. By W. R. Grove, Q.C., M.A., F.R.S., &c. Third edition. London: 1855. 8vo, pp. 229.

On the Mutual Relations of the Vital and Physical Forces. By William B. Carpenter, M.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., &c. "Philosophical

Transactions, 1850."

The Phasis of Matter; being an Outline of the Discoveries and Applications of Modern Chemistry. By T. Lindley Kemp, M.D. 2 vols. London: 1855. Post 8vo, pp. 558.

The Chemical and Physiological Balance of Organic Nature. By MM. Dumas and Boussingault, Members of the Institute of France. Third edition, translated from the French. London: 1844. Fcap. 8vo, pp. 156.

THAT "there is nothing new under the sun," is an apophthegm more applicable to matter than to mind, and more truly represents the results of physical inquiry than those of an attentive survey of the moral history of man. For in the latter, progress is the rule; whilst retrogression can scarcely be called an exception, so seldom is it real. But in the Cosmos, cyclical repetition every where seems to prevail. The alternation of day and night gives us our first and simplest experience of this revolution; the succession of the seasons our next: and although no one diurnal period is divided exactly like that which precedes or that which follows it, and although in no two succeeding years do spring, summer, autumn, and winter follow precisely the same course; yet when terms of sufficient length are compared, minor irregularities disappear, the general averages become wonderfully accordant, and limits are marked out beyond which we need not expect any aberration. As the earliest astronomers learned to predict eclipses by comparison of their recurring cycles, so those disturbances in the movements of the planets, and that displacement of even the sun himself, which the theory of universal gravitation predicts as its necessary results, and which modern observation shows really to occur, have the law impressed upon them, "thus far shalt thou go, and no further;" being found by computation to pass through a cycle, whose duration, though capable of being expressed in figures, cannot be definitely conceived by the mind.

Not less obvious is this tendency to cyclical repetition in the changes which are constantly taking place in the substance of our globe, and in the living inhabitants of its surface. Of the aggregate of these changes, the oscillations of the magnetic

needle may, in some degree, be taken as an expression; and the variations which are discernible in these, by careful and continuous observation, are found to be eminently cyclical. Besides diurnal, monthly, and annual variations of considerable regularity, which are traceable to changes in the place of the sun and moon, but which are occasionally interrupted by "magnetic storms" that put the compasses in different parts of the world into simultaneous agitation, there is a variation of very constant rate in the northward and southward pointing of the compass, between certain extreme easterly and extreme westerly limits, which extends over a cycle of centuries; and there can be no doubt that this is indicative of some correspondingly regular change in the interior of the globe; though as to its nature, only the vaguest speculations can at present be offered.

If now, with the geologist, we examine the structure of such parts of the solid crust as lie within reach of our scrutiny, the evidence of cyclical change seems at first sight to fail us; for according to the current hypothesis, whilst the original molten mass nearly uniform in its consistence and composition, gradually losing heat from its exterior, has been skinned over (as it were) with a solidified shell, the structure of that shell has been so modified by physical, chemical, and vital agencies, that its substance has been gradually differentiated into a series of layers, dissimilar both in mineral structure and in chemical composition; and this without any apparent tendency to return to its original homogeneousness. Yet when we examine the successive stages of this progress, we find in every part that the disturbing agencies have acted in cyclical periods, and that one cycle has been very much the repetition of another. The two great opposing agencies, fire and water, have been in antagonistic operation from the first. The one has been continually upheaving, the other yet more constantly degrading. The one has fused together minerals of the most dissimilar nature into formless masses; the other has not only worn these down and deposited them in successive layers, but has also separated their components in various ways; so that we find clays and sandstones, slates and limestones, shales and conglomerates, interstratified with more or less of regularity. And the more carefully the history of these deposits is studied, the more does it become apparent that they owe their existence to frequently-recurring series of changes, essentially the same in their nature, though modified in their results both by what has preceded and what has followed them.

Throughout the whole, one thing remains unchanged, the absolute quantity of each of the elementary forms of matter; for whatever may be the new chemical combinations into which they