hear of a stone temple in the middle of a tank in Cashmeer, where devotees surround themselves with fire, till they are consumed, and think they are thereby pleasing the Deity; and at Nagama there is a sacred stream, on the borders of which many fanatics consume themselves with fire: but the parallel between the two elements may be extended further. Fire and water were not only viewed alike as instruments of purification, but as instruments of destruction too; a point of view so diametrically opposite to that which we have been considering, that it has occasioned an apparent contradiction in the history of the giants; and we behold them under an aspect as different as that of a person who looks at the reflection of his own face on the back of a bright silver spoon, first in one direction, and then in another; in one position shortened, and prodigiously dilated; in the other thin and lengthened; yet it is the same face which he views and so the giants who under one aspect were of the party who conquered the deluge by surviving it, under another are the gigantic powers of the deluge itself; and on this principle the triumph over them was commemorated by the Romans at the beginning of the year in the festival of Victory and for the same reason the giants Otus and Ephialtes, the sons of Neptune, are said to have imprisoned Ares in a brazen cage during

1 Gladwin's Translation of the Ayeen Akbery, ii. 133.

2 Fête de la Victoire. Lorsque l'année commençoit, on venoit de célébrer la victoire remportée sur les Géans. Hist. du Calendrier, par M. Court de Gebelin, p. 227.

3 Discours Préliminaire, p. 149. by the same author.

thirteen (lunar) months'; for Ares is only an Hellenic version of the Hebrew Arets, the earth. On the other hand the Hindoos, whose fictions are usually more extravagant than those of the West, represent the punishment of the sinful world at the æra of the deluge to have been effected by fire instead of water. They say, that the genius of the planet, which they call Sani, that is, Saturn, was born in Arkisthan, the country of the Ark; and it was during his government that his pious subjects fled to the hilly countries bordering on the river Nanda, while the irreligious and rash perished in the deserts of burning sand, to which the eyes of the tyrant sun reduced all the plains, on which he looked. Meantime his brother was performing his devotions on Trisringa, or the mountain with three peaks. In this account there is an evident mixture of some persecution of the Arkites grafted upon the facts which formed the foundation of their system; the preservation of some pious persons the diluvian mount. Nanda is used for the Nile, and is the name of Siva's bull; just as Neptune, the god of ocean, is called by Hesiod Taurine : and it may be reasonably conjectured that Sani's name may be connected with the Ark through the medium of the Hebrew Sana: for the city Debir, which has the additional name of Kirjath Sana, or the city of Sana in the book of Joshua3, is said by the Chaldee Paraphrast upon the book of Judges

upon

4

to be synonymous with Kirjath Arche.' Seneh is the name of one of the sharp rocks that stood in the passage of Michmash. In the Greek of the Seventy it is Senna, and it is derived from a word which signifies a sharp rock. It has been already shown that Shang in Chinese signifies a mountain, and that the Indian Sani with his trident and bow has been identified with Menu and Noah, and may be recognised in Shony, the object of superstitious observance among the Irish Celts up to a very recent period.

136

CHAP. XVII.

SACRED ISLANDS. — ANCIENT NOTICES OF BRITAIN. - THE FORTUNATE ISLES, NOT THE AZORES, NOR THE CANARIES, NOR OASES, NOR BERGAZI, NOR IN LAKE TRITONIS, NOR PLATO'S ATLANTIS. LEGENDS CONCERNING THE OGY

GIAN ISLAND AND THE HESPERIDES EXPLAINED.

HESIOD'S TARTARUS THE BRITISH ISLES. SATURN'S BARIS IN BRITAIN. — PINDAR'S HYPER

SACRED CELL.
BOREAN SACRIFICE.

VISIT OF PERSEUS TO ATLAS.

THE learned and laborious antiquary, who first explored the early history of Ireland, maintains that the round towers of that country were constructed for the worship of fire by Magian colonies, who came from Persia, as well as the sacred cells at New Grange and other places. There may, doubtless, be sufficient ground for believing that they were sometimes so appropriated by the more recent usurpation of that sect; but it can never be admitted, that the worship of fire was their original destination in a country, which abounds so much with evidence of Arkite worship. The Celts were uniformly attached to these rites, and have left behind them the most durable monuments of that attachment,-towers, and pyramids, and pillars, and tumuli, and Cromlechs, and rockingstones, and rock basins. The inquiry, therefore, into the nature and amount of the evidence which

they afford, necessarily comprises all the British islands; for their first inhabitants were all branches from the same Celtic stock; and since they were undoubtedly of Eastern origin, and their affinity to those nations who settled on the banks of the Indus, as well as on the shores of the Mediterranean and Baltic, has been unanswerably concluded from an accurate examination and analysis of those languages', it might be expected that some incidental notices of their early intercourse would be discoverable here and there in ancient writers fond of traditionary lore, although scarcely, perhaps, intelligible to their less informed contemporaries, and although the facts themselves would be in process of time totally forgotten or misunderstood. Accordingly, Mr. Wilford was assured by the Brahmins, that a great intercourse anciently subsisted between India and the countries in the West; and that the British Isles are described in the Puranas, one of them being called Breta-st'han, or the Place of Religious Duty 2; but the general name was Tricatachel, or the Mountain with Three

1 Thus, as in the Sanscrit language, words merely in sequence have an influence on each other in the change of terminations and sometimes of initial letters, which change is called Sandhi, or conjunction; so in the Celtic dialects permutations, in many respects analogous to those of Sandhi, are constant and indispensable in the formation of sentences: thus for yn pen, we read ym; for yn bara, ym mara. Colonel Vans Kennedy, therefore, has ventured a great deal too far, in his "Researches into the Origin and Affinity of the Principal Languages of Asia and Europe," when he ventured to contradict the assertion of Davis in the preface to his Dictionary: "Ausim affirmare linguam Britannicam (Celticam) tum vocibus, tum phrasibus et orationis contextu, tum literarum pronuntiatione manifestam cum orientalibus habere congruentiam et affinitatem," p. 85 · Prichard on the Celtic Nations, p. 21.

2 As. Res. iii. 49.