Excerpt from Improvement Era, Vol. 2: Organ of Young Men's Improvement Associations; April, 1899 We had the Buddhist goddess of the country, the mother of the people, ten handed, holding in each hand the weapons for the defense of her children. We had the white goddess of learning, playing on her vena, a stringed instrument of music, the strings of wisdom, because, my friends, all wisdom is musical, where there is a discord there is no deep wisdom. The goddess of good fortune holding in her arms, not the horn, but the basket of plenty, blessing the nations of India, was there, and the god with the head of an elephant, and the god who rides on a peacock - martial men are always fashionable, you know - and the thirty-three million of gods and goddesses besides. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.