book can hardly fail to be interesting to the general reader, who may not have time or opportunity to refer to the sacred writings from which they are taken.
A word of explanation respecting the classification of the deities is called for. It will be noticed that some of those described as belonging to the Vedic Age appear under the same or other names in the Purānas; whilst others spoken of as belonging to the Purānic Age have their origin, traceable indeed with difficulty in some cases, in the Vedas. It was a common practice with the writers of the later books to claim a remote antiquity, and the authority of the Vedas, for the more recent additions to the Pantheon. In some instances an epithet, descriptive of one of the old deities, is attached as the name of a later one. And by this means the old and the new are linked together. The Vedic gods are those whose description is chiefly to be found in the Vedas, and whose worship was more general in the Vedic Age; the Purānic are those who are more fully described in the Puranas, and whose worship was more general in the Purānic Age. Any very rigid classification it is impossible to make.
Calcutta,
February 22, 1882.
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