repared by authors who had never set
their eyes upon one line written by either Megasthenes or Nearchus
himself; and that knowing so much one is informed by Western historians
that among the works of Arrian, Book VII. of the "Anabasis of
Alexander," is "the chief authority on the subject of the Indian
invasion--a book unfortunately with a gap in its twelfth chapter"--one
may well conceive upon what a broken reed Western authority leans for
its Indian chronology. Arrian lived over 600 years after Buddha's
death; Strabo, 500 (55 "B.C."); Diodorus Siculus--quite a trustworthy
compiler!--about the first century; Plutarch over 700 anno Buddhae, and
Quintus Curtius over 1,000 years! And when, to crown this army of
witnesses against the Buddhist annals, the reader is informed by our
Olympian critics that the works of the last-named author--than whom no
more blundering (geographically, chronologically, and historically)
writer ever lived--form along with the Greek history of Arrian the most
valuable source of information respecting the military career of
Alexander the Great--then the only wonder is that the great conqueror
was not made by his biographers to have--Leonidas-like--defended the
Thermopylean passes in the Hindu Kush against the invasion of the first
Vedic Brahmins "from the Oxus." Withal the Buddhist dates are either
rejected or only accepted pro tempore. Well may the Hindu resent the
preference shown to the testimony of Greeks--of whom some, at least, are
better remembered in Indian history as the importers into Jambudvipa of
every Greek and Roman vice known and unknown to their day--against his
own national records and history. "Greek influence" was felt, indeed,
in India, in this, and only in this, one particular. Greek damsels
mentioned as an article of great traffic for India--Persian and Greek
Yavanis--were the fore-mothers of the modern nautch-girls, who had till
then remained pure virgins of the inner temples. Alliances with the
Autiochuses and the Seleucus Nicators bore no better fruit than the
rotten apple of Sodom. Pataliputra, as prophesied by Gautama Buddha,
found its fate in the waters of the Ganges, having been twice before
nearly destroyed, again like Sodom, by the fire of heaven.

Reverting to the main subject, the "contradictions" between the
Ceylonese and Chino-Tibetan chronologies actually prove nothing. If the
Chinese annalists of Saul in accepting the prophecy of our Lord that "a
thou