and Phœnicia, and of a Herakles (presumably known as Krishna) in India, does not point to some distant Central Asian progenitor, common to the two,—a mythic half-man, half-god, strong, righteous, and full of heroic mercy, who leaves his impress even on early conceptions of Siva, amongst Hindu peoples, to be transmitted in divergent forms, in long-echoing memories, to one and another of the Aryan peoples. If so, is the Krishna of the Return to Mathura, of the Snake Kaliya, of the Mountain and the Demons, the Indian version of this Central Asian Herakles?
We have thus to decide whether the Krishna of the Puranic stories here given, and the Krishna Partha Sarathi of the Mahabharata, are two, or one. On the answer to this depends a great deal of history. If they are two, is Krishna Partha Sarathi new at the time of the last recension of the Mahabharata, or is he some ancient hero of the Aryan peoples, with whom Krishna-Herakles is then fused, to become the popular vehicle of Vedic ideas? In the hands of highly-trained Indian scholars—competent as no foreigner could be to apply the tests of language and of theological evolution—it is my belief that these inquiries might receive reliable solutions. I doubt that alien opinions could ever be much more than interesting speculations. But, in any case,
