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about 600 before the Puránas and Itihafas, which, I am fully convinced, were not the productions of VYA'SA; fo that, if the fon of PARA'SARA Committed the traditional Védas to writing in the Sanferit of his father's time, the original of this book must have received its present form about 880 years before CHRIST's birth. If the texts, indeed, which VYA'SA collected, had been actually written in a much older dialect, by the fages preceding him, we muft inquire into the greateft poffible age of the Védas themselves: now one of the longest and finest Upanishads in the second Véda contains three lists, in a regular series upwards, of at most forty-two pupils and preceptors, who fucceffively received and tranfmitted (probably by oral tradition) the doctrines contained in that Upanishad; and as the old Indian priefts were students at fifteen, and instructors at twenty-five, we cannot allow more than ten years, on an average, for each interval between the respective traditions; whence, as there are forty fuch intervals, in two of the lifts between VYA'SA, who arranged the whole work, and AYA'SYA, who is extolled at the beginning of it, and just as many, in the third lift, between the compiler and YAJNYAWALCYA, who makes the principal figure in it, we find the higheft age of the Yajur Véda to be 1580 years before the birth of our Saviour, (which would make it older than the five books of MOSES) and that of our Indian law tract about

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REPRINTED FOR J. SEWELL, CORNHILL; AND J. DEBRETT,

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M294 J8

1796

564644-408

THE PREFACE.

Tis a maxim in the fcience of legislation

and government, that Laws are of no avail without manners, or, to explain the fentence more fully, that the best intended legislative provifions would have no beneficial effect even at first, and none at all in a fhort course of time, unless they were congenial to the dispofition and habits, to the religious prejudices, and approved immemorial ufages of the people for whom they were enacted; especially if that people univerfally and fincerely believed, that all their ancient usages and established rules of conduct had the sanction of an actual revelation from heaven: the legislature of Britain having shown, in compliance with this maxim, an intention to leave the natives of thefe Indian provinces in poffeffion of their own Laws, at leaft on the titles of contracts and inheritances, we may humbly prefume, that all future provifions, for the administration of justice and government in India, will be conformable, as far as the natives are affected by them, to the manners and opinions of the natives themselves; an object which cannot poffibly be attained, until thofe manners and opinions can be fully and accurately known. These confiderations, and a few others more immediately within

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