A valued literary friend suggests that the social life described in the following pages is too much like ours, but why should their daily life and social customs be greatly different from ours?  The Aryan migrations to India and to Europe were in large masses, of course taking their social customs, or as the Romans would say, their household gods, with them.

What wonder, then, that the home as Tacitus describes it in the “Wilds of Germany” was substantially what Mueller finds from the very structure of the Sanscrit and European languages it must have been in Bactria, the common cradle of the Aryan race.  There can scarcely be a doubt that twenty-five hundred years ago the daily life and social customs in the north of India, which had been under undisputed Aryan control long enough for the Sanscrit language to spring up, come to perfection and finally become obsolete, were more like ours than like those of modern India after the, many—­and especially the Mohammedan—­conquests and after centuries of oppression and alien rule.

If a thousand English-speaking Aryans should now be placed on some distant island, how much would their social customs and even amusements differ from ours in a hundred years?  Only so far as changed climate and surrounding’s compelled.

I give as an introduction an outline of the golden, silver, brazen and iron ages, as described by the ancient poets and believed in by all antiquity, as it was in the very depths of the darkness of the iron age that our great light appeared in Northern India.  The very denseness of the darkness of the age in which he came makes the clearness of the light more wonderful, and accounts for the joy with which it was received and the rapidity with which it spread.

Not to enter into the niceties of chronological questions, the mission of Buddha may be roughly said to have commenced about five hundred years before the commencement of our era, and with incessant labors and long and repeated journeys to have lasted forty-five years, when at about the age of eighty he died, or, as the Buddhists more truthfully and more beautifully say, entered Nirvana.

  Henry T. Niles. 
  Toledo, January 1, 1894.

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Since this work was in the hands of the printer I have read the recent work of Bishop Copelston, of Columbo, Ceylon, and it was a source of no small gratification to find him in all material points agreeing with the result of my somewhat extensive investigations as given within, for in Ceylon, if anywhere, we would expect accuracy.  Here the great Buddhist development first comes in contact with authentic history during the third century B.C. in the reign of the great Asoka, the discovery of whose rock inscriptions shed such a flood of light on primitive Buddhism, while it still retained enough of its primitive power, as we learn from those inscriptions themselves, to turn that monarch from a course of cruel tyranny, and, as we learn from the history of Ceylon, to induce his son and daughter to abandon royalty and become the first missionaries to that beautiful island.