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12(5 THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY. [April, 1875. 11 inn respondent with, the evil action. The who permits an unworthy guest to be present at a middha which he celebrates (p. 68, 133), must swallow in the next world as many red- hot iron balls as themouthfuls swallowed at the feast by that guest. If one, through ignorance of the law (p. 110, 1G7), sheds blood from the body of a Brahman not engaged in battle. as many particles of dust as the blood shall roll up from the ground, for bo many years shall the shedder of that blood be mangled by other ani- mals in the next birth. The action inevitably brings its own retribution. Another remark- able feature of the system is the transfer of me- rit and demerit (p. 171, 94). If one man wrongs another, he takes upon himself the sins of the latter, while the injured man on his side acquires all the good conduct which the injurer had pre- viously stored up for a future life. -And a singular advantage or efficacy was attributed to just punishment in this world at the hands of the civil power : for Mann says (p. 230, 318) " men who have committed offences and have received from kings the punishment due to them go pure to heaven, and become as clear as those who have done well." Although the Institutes afford us many items of information relative to the existing state of society, in view of which they were composed, these are insufficient to enable us to reproduce it as a whole. We get but glimpses of it. Amongst other things, the people are represent- ed as made up of (p. 289, 4) four principal classes or groups— termed the pure castes — namely, the Brahman, the K&hatriya, the V a i s y a , and the S u d r a . The sepa- rate creation attributed to each of these may be taken to indicate that, bo far back as popular tradition reached, these classes had maintained themselves in substance hereditarily distinct, and also separate in occupation, pursuits, and employment. The separation of the people into these four classes was certainly an existing fact even in the Vedic period, for it is mentioned in the hymn to Purusha,— one of the hymns of the Jtiy Veda, where each of the classes is allegori- cally represented as constituting that part of P u r u s h a (or Brahma), from which Manu af- terwards, and later still other Smritis and Purd- nas, said that they were severally produced. In the Mahal hdrata, however, there is a passage which asserts expressly that originally there was no distinction of castes, the existing distri- bution having arisen out of differences of cha- racter and occupation, — a view of the matter which is, no donbt, substantially correct. In the Vishnu Fnrana-, too, occur several instances of the different sons of one parent coming to be of different castes by reason of their several occupations. The whole of this interesting to- pic is exhausted by Dr. Muir (Sanskrit Texts, vol. I. 2nd ed. p. 160), who says " we may fairly conclude that the separate origination of the four castes was far from being an article of belief universally received by Indian antiquity." So far as I can judge from the English version of the Institutes, the passage in which Mann appears to ascribe each class to a separate crea- tion is a comparatively late interpolation, incon- sistent with the general tenor of the original text. The division of the social functions of these classes is described for us in Mann's Dharma Stislra several times over (p. 12, 88 et seq. and p. 28C), plainly pictured from the reality ; and doubtless there was then no me- mory of any different state of things. The description itself discloses an advanced stage of civilization, and we have not the means of judg- ing how that situation had been arrived at. However, it may probably not be nnrcasoi to assume that the Br unmans were a sacer- dotal class, sprung originally from one family, or group of families, like the tribe of Levites among the Jews ; the K b h u t r i y a s an heredi- tary aristocracy, the rulers and administrators of the land, somewhat resembling the Patrician Order at Borne, or that which the nobles of the feudal times came to be ; the V a i s y a s all the remaining free Aryans, who — engaged in t In • more respectable and well-to-do occupations of work- ing life, such as trade, agriculture, &c. in fact the capitalists of a primitive society — succeeded in maintaining privilege of birth ; and the d r a s , a comparatively servile class, composed of all lower ranks of Aryans, and perhaps of sub- ject aborigines. It may not here be out of place to remark that as the stream of Aryan immi- gration into India flowed on from the north- west, it no doubt, in course of tune, became more and more intermixed with the existing population of the country, and from this obtain- ed, among other things, the ingredient of the dark skin. The result of the intermixture