288                        ALBERUNPS INDIA.

principles, you will find that it is confused. Conceding
that the Great Bear is under the pole and that the
place of the pole is absolute height, the Great Bear
lies beloio the zenith of the inhabitants of Meru. In
this statement he is right, but he is mistaken with
regard to the planets. For the word below is, accord¬
ing to him, to be understood so as to mean a greater or
smaller distance from the earth; and thus taken, his
statement (regarding the distances of the planets from
the earth) is not correct, unless we suppose that Saturn
has, of all planets, the greatest declination from the
equator, the next greatest Jupiter, then Mars, the Sun,
Venus, &c., and that at the same time this amount of
their declination is a constant one. This, however,
does not correspond to reality.

If we take the sum total of the whole statement of
the Vishnu-Dharma, the author is right in so far as the
fixed stars are higher than the planets, but he is wrong
in so far as the pole is not higher than the fixed stars.

The mill-like rotation of the planets is the first
motion towards the west, not the second motion indicated
by the author. According to him, the planets are the
spirits of individuals who have gained exaltation by
their merits, and who have returned to it after the
end of their life in a human shape. According to
my opinion, the author uses a number in the words
thousands of times (p. 287), either because he wanted
to intimate that their existence is an existence in our
meaning of the term, an evolution out of the Swa/xt?
into the irpa^cs (hence something finite, subject to
numeration or determination by measure), or because
he meant to indicate that some of those spirits obtain
moksha, others not. Hence their number is liable to
a more or less, and everything of this description is of
a finite nature.