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pestilence is a manifestation of the Divine anger, though it has long been dying away, is by no means extinct, even in the most civilised countries. Superstitions of this kind will, of course, be strongest either where medical knowledge is most backward, or where disease is most abundant. It is in tropical climates that nature is most terrible; and here, says our author, "imagination runs riot, and religion is founded on fear; while in Europe nature is subject to man, and reason rules supreme." This theme he ilhirates by the extreme instances of india and greece; and he generalises his conclusions into the statement that "the tendency of Asiatic civilisation was to widen the distance between men and their deities; the tendency of Greek civilisation was to diminish it." Hence "in Greece we for the first time meet with hero-worship, [337] that is, the deification of mortals"; this could not take place in tropical countries. "It is therefore natural that it should form no part of the ancient Indian religion; neither was it known to the Egyptians, nor to the Persians, nor, so far as I am aware, to the Arabians"; but it was part of the national religionof Greece, and has been found so natural to Europeans, that "the same custom was afterwards renewed witheminent success by the Romish Church." Perhaps nowriter of pretension ever made a more disgraceful exhibition of ignorance and unreason than mr. buckle in these phiages. unreason:for if the Catholic cultus of saints is to be identified with the Greek deification of heroes, then certainly this deification is not simply European; it is as natural to the Indian Catholic as to the Italian or German, not to mention the Orientals. Exactly the same thing is found in Mahometanism, wherever it spreads. If Allah alone receives divine honours, anyhow the chief cultus is paid to the tomb of the prophet, and to the graves of the various holy personages with which Moslem countries are so thickly studded. But if this cultus is not what Mr. Buckle meant by the Greek hero-worship, then his mention of the Catholic practice is invidious, impertinent, and utterly irrelevant to his argument. Ignorance: for the "deification of mortals," so far from forming no part of the ancient Indian and Egyptian religions, was their very central idea and foundation. The fearful, terrible gods that Mr. Buckle's imagination is so full of, were only elemental deities, rising and falling with the world, destined to be annihilated; while the human soul was to last for ever, and was in its essence superior to all those beings that kept it in a tedious but temporary thraldom. The whole idea of the Vedas is the power of the Brahmin over the elemental deities, exerted by means of the sacrifice. The deities in question, though vast in power and wonderfully large, are by themselves undefined and vague; they want personality, and therefore require personal direction; though they are in some senseuniversal intellect and [338] soul, yet they are formlessand void; they are mere blunderers till they are directed by the more sure intelligence of minds akin to those of man. Hence, in the Vedantic genesis of things, the elemental deities are the matter of forces which compose the universe; while the intelligent agents who conduct the creative process are the seven primeval sages, Rishis, or Manus, whose very name attests their human nature.1 It is by the sacrifice of these Rishis, and by the metres they chanted, that the mundane deities .