kings will be of churlish spirit, violent temper, and ever addicted to falsehood and wickedness. They will inflict death on women, children, and cows; they will seize the property of subjects, be of limited power, and will, for the most part, rapidly rise and fall; their lives will be short, their desires insatiable, and they will display but little piety. The people of various countries intermingling with them will follow their example; and the

barbarians being powerful in the patronage of princes, whilst purer tribes are neglected, the people will perish. Wealth and piety will decrease day by day, until the world shall be wholly depraved. Property alone will confer rank, wealth will be the only source of devotion, passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes, falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation, and women will be the objects merely of sensual gratification. Earth will be venerated only for its mineral treasures (i.e. no spot will be peculiarly sacred); the Brahmanical thread will constitute a Brahman; external types will be the only distinctions of the several orders of life, dishonesty will be the universal means of subsistence, weakness will be the cause of dependence, menace and presumption will be the subterfuge for learning, liberality will be devotion, simple ablution will be purification (i.e. gifts will be made from the impulse of ordinary feeling, not in connection with religious rites or as an act of devotion, and ablution will be performed for pleasure or comfort, not religiously with prescribed ceremonies and prayers). Mutual assent will be marriage, fine clothes will be dignity, and water afar off will be esteemed a holy spring. The people, unable to bear the heavy burdens imposed upon them by their avaricious sovereigns, will take refuge among the valleys, and be glad to feed upon wild honey, herbs, roots, fruits, flowers, and leaves; their only covering will be the bark of trees, and they will be exposed to cold and wind, and sun and rain. No man's life will exceed three-and-twenty years. Thus in the Kali Age shall decay flourish, until the human race approaches annihilation." It is rather strange that the condition of men, in what appeared to the writer of this Purana as the most miserable he could imagine, where their dress was bark and their food

consisted of roots and fruits, was in the earliest ages regarded as the most desirable. It was thus the old Rishis lived, who are held in the greatest esteem.