strongest trees, and, like the hurricanes of the western world, sweeping every object before them; and which at others dispersed over the deep the rich cargoes of their various commerce, the produce of the silkworm, and the jewels of Golconda. Hence, perturbed and terrified, this superstitious race beheld the aërial phænomena with reverential horror: every cloud has its directing dæmon, and every gale its atttendant dewtah. Superstition hears some perturbed spirit of the vasty deep raging in the midnight storm, and sees the angry deity launching over the Gauts the terrific and irresistible shaft of the tropical lightning.

How far the first race of Indians might carry into experiment and practice the philosophical observations thus made by them on the operations of nature in that various clime, it is impossible to decide, till their philosophical books shall have been more accurately examined; but that they were no strangers to the generative and invigorating influence of air acting forcibly upon other elementary matter, and particularly on the watery element, is indubitably evident, from the universal traditionary doctrine which runs through all the cosmogonies of the East, that, at the beginning of time, the wind of God, or a wind from God, (for, by this perverted title they generally denominate the

Пveυμa Ayov of Scripture,) violently agitated the waters of the chaos and rendered them prolific. We have shown before, that the cosmogony of the Phoenicians affirms the principle of the universe to have been a dark wind, turbulent and boundless; and, in the latter part of that description, we read, that the air shining with æthereal light, by its fiery influence on the sea and earth, winds were begotten, and clouds, and great defluxions of the heavenly waters:

The ancient philosophers of India, like the stoics of Greece, who in all probability borrowed the doctrine from the Indian schools, which many of them visited or obtained them through the channel of Egypt, imagined a fifth element, formed of the more refined particles of igneous air, which they call the AKASS; that pure, transparent, luminous, æther, in which the planets and other celestial bodies roll. This subtile spirit, this penetrating fluid, they conceive to pervade all bodies, and to be the great principle of vitality and bond of all existence. They talk concerning it with transport; but, amidst their raptures, totally different from the atheistical fabricators of the Phoenician cosmogony, their greatest and most venerated philosophers of the VEDANTA School never forget to advert to the SUPREME CREATIVE SPIRIT of the universe from which it emaned, his august répre

sentative and powerful agent in the animation and direction of boundless worlds.

A knowledge of pneumatic science was also, in a great degree, necessary to the carrying on many of the mechanic arts for which the Indians were so famous; and if they were so far advanced in chemistry, in the earliest ages, as there is every reason to suppose they were, they must have required, for their furnaces, machines for collecting, compressing, and discharging, the current of air, in a body forcible enough to promote their respective operations; and these must, in consequence, have been of various dimensions, from those that excited the intense flame, where the rugged ore of iron was fused, to the gentler blast necessary to perfect the exquisite work of the goldsmith and the enameller. The invention of the BELLOWS is, indeed, ascribed by Strabo to Anacharsis, the Scythian ;* but is far more likely to have originated among a race represented, from all antiquity, to have been practised in metallurgic science, and devoted to those mechanic arts, which most wanted the assistance of that useful implement.

It was also utterly impossible that mines could be worked to any great depth or extent, without the assistance of what are called airshafts, or certain tubes formed of wood or metal,

* Strabonis Geograph. lib. vii. p 209.

by way of vent for the discharge of fiery damps and sulphureous vapours, and the conveyance of fresh air for respiration to the miner. In those mines they learned the nature of the various species of air, and, imitating what they there observed, were enabled, amid their mystic rites, to put in practice those midnight phænomena which excited the wonder of the weak and the terror of the superstitious.

From the awful and terrific scenes exhibited in the MYSTERIES, from their acquaintance with the process of making gunpowder, and a variety of other circumstances that argue no superficial knowledge of the properties and effects of different kinds of air, it may reasonably be inferred that the old Indians were not entirely strangers to ELECTRICITY; for, in fact, that fine subtile spirit, pervading all things, that fifth element, that akass, as they term it, seems to be no other than what modern philosophers denominate the electric fluid. Indeed, Sir William Jones amply justifies this supposition in his Treatise on the Philosophy of the Indians, declaring, that, without wishing to pluck a leaf from the never-fading laurels of Newton, he discovers, in Sanscreet Authors, a great part of his admirable philosophy, especially those parts that relate to that subtile spirit which he suspected to lurk concealed, but not

dormant, in all bodies, and to cause "attraction and repulsion; the emission, reflection, and refraction of light; ELECTRICITY, calefaction, sensation, and muscular motion; and that the Vedas abound with allusions to a force universally attractive, which they ascribe chiefly to the SUN, thence called Aditya, the ATTRACTOR."* The mention of the doctrine of attraction naturally leads to reflections on that of the MAGNET, whose power to attract iron they must have well known, if, as there is every reason to presume, from their early voyages and their intimate connection in commerce with the Phoenicians, they had the knowledge and experience of the COMPASS in navigation, an experience which they might have obtained from Noah himself, to whom the deity probably imparted the secret of its wonderful virtues, to guide the bark which contained the precious deposit of all living creatures over the waters of the boundless ocean. Its attractive force could have excited no great surprise in a race, who, in their beautiful manufactures and ornamental furniture, made such large use of the genuine ELECTRUM; that amber which has ever been in such high request in the cabinets and museums of Asia, and the attractive properties of which were so well known, so much

Asiatic Researches, vol. iv. p. 177