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OF THE HINDUS.
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hands, he remanufactures the earthi and its inhabitants, and this is what is intended by secondary creation. This kind of creation is repeated daily during the 100 years of Bralımá's existence;-a term which cannot be expressed in mortal years by any of our scales of numeration, but which may be written with fifteen figures, or 311,040,000,000,000 years *.
At the end of this term Brahmá himself expires, and with him die all the gods and holy sages, and all forms whatever retrograde successively into their constituent elements, until the whole is finally merged into the single or double rudiment of being, universal spirit, or primary matter and primary spirit, according to the theories of the dualistic or non-dualistic philosophers. After a considerable interval, similar causes produce similar effects; nature and spirit are again in movement, the creation is renewed, and the universe thus eternally fluctuates between existence and non-existence, without any motive, without any end, that rational conjecture can guess at.
Upon the subject of the extravagant chronology of the Hindus it inay be remarked, that the enormous periods of which it is composed are of a purely mythological character. The attempts that have been made to account for them on astronomical computations have led to no satisfactory results. How far they are analogous to similar extravagancies in the chronology of other nations of antiquity is also undetermined;
* [Dr. J. Muir's Original Sanskrit Texts, I, 18 ff.]
