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village when his mother was on her death-bed when he remained there only for a few days. It is difficult to see at what period of his life-time he was engaged in making regulations for the castes of Malabar.
III.The work under consiperation represents Malabar as the seat of Bhattapada's triumphs over the Buddhists, and says that this teacher established himself in Malabar and expelled the Buddhists from that country. This statement alone will be sufficient to show to our readers the fictitious character of the account contained in this book. According to every other Hindu work, this great teacher of Purva Mimansa was born in Northern India; almost all his famous disciples and followers were living in that part of the country, and according to Vidyaranya's account he died at Allahabad.
For the foregoing reasons we cannot place any reliance upon this account of Malabar.
From the traditions and other accounts which we have hitherto examined, Mr. Wilson comes to the conclusion that Shankaracharya lived in the end of the 8th and the beginning of the 9th centuries of the Christian Era. The accounts of the Sringeri, Kudali and Cumbaconum Mathams, and the traditions current in the Bombay Presidency, as shown in the biographical sketches published at Bombay, place Sankara in some century before the Christian Era. On the other hand, Kerala Utpatti, the information obtained by Dr. Buchanan in his travels through Malabar, and the opinions expressed by Dr. Taylor and Mr. Colebrooke, concur in assigning to him an antiquity of about 1,000 years. The remaining traditions referred to by Mr. Wilson are as much opposed to his opinion as to the conclusion that Sankara lived before Christ. We shall now leave it to our readers to say whether, under such circumstances, Mr. Wilson is justified in asserting that "the weight of authority is altogether in favour" of his theory.
We have already referred to the writings of almost all the European Orientalists who expressed an opinion upon the
