Transcriber's note

• Obvious printer errors have been silently corrected.
• Original spelling, hyphenation and punctuation have been kept, but variant spellings were made consistent when a predominant usage was found.
• Footnotes have been renumbered and moved to the end of the book.
• Blank pages have been skipped.
• Illustrations have been slightly moved so that they do not break up paragraphs while remaining close to the text they illustrate.
• Illustration captions have been harmonized and made consistent so that the same expressions appear both in them and in the List of Illustrations.
• Both “Bramha” and “Brahma” have been kept as distinct even though they probably denote the same deity.