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RELIGIOUS PRACTICES AND OPINIONS
the subject is only of importance as furnishing an additional argument against the authority of those works in which it is seriously affirmed as truth.
The philosophical systems take no notice of the creation of man except in the abstract: for the origin of the human race we must have recourse to other authorities, and particularly to the Puránas, in which various accounts of the occurrence are narrated. It is not difficult to detect, through all their embellishments and corruptions, the tradition of the descent of mankind from a single pair, however much they have disguised it by the misemployment of the figures of allegory and personification. The embodied creative attribute, the agent in formal creation, Brahmá, is fabled to have divided himself into two creaturesone male, one female; from their union the first man and first woman were born, who married and begot children, and from them sprang not only mankind but all living creatures. This is the general outline of the mode in which it is related that the earth was peopled, and it is probably traceable to the Vedas: but the heroic poems and the Puránas have remodelled the tale in a variety of shapes, until it presents an incoherent and conflicting series of legends— not always very intelligible, and sometimes not very decent. I must refer for details to the Vishnu Puráňa*.
The description of the phenomena of secondary creation includes an account of the disposition of the
*
[See Dr. J. Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts I, 18-43.]
