a black pyramidal stone worshipped by the Gentoos, who pretend that it fell from heaven or was miraculously presented on the place where their temple stands. There are many other idols of this figure in India; which, however, are all but accounted copies from the Jaggernaut. According to the best information Mr Grofe could obtain, this stone is meant to represent the power presiding over universal generation, which they attribute to the general heat and influence of the sun acting in subordination to it. Domestic idols of the form of the Jaggernaut, and distinguished by the same name, are made by the Gentoos. These are niched up in a kind of triumphal car, decorated with gilding and tinsel; which for some days they keep in the best apartment in their house. During this time their devotion consists in exhibiting the most obscene postures, and acting all manner of lasciviousness, in sight as it were of the idol, and as the most acceptable mode of worship to that deity it represents; after which they carry it in its gilded car in procession to the Ganges, and throw in all together as an acknowledgment to that river of its congenial fertilization with that of the sun. Formerly this machine was decorated with jewels and other expensive ornaments; but the Indians are now become less extravagant, as they found that the Moors and Christians, watching the places where they threw in their idols, dived for them for the sake of the jewels with which they were adorned.

Our author conjectures, that this pyramidal form of the Gentoo idol was originally taken from that of flame, which always inclines to point upwards. From this Indian deity he supposes the shape of the Paphian Venus to have been derived, for which Tacitus could not account. This image had nothing of the human form in it, but rose orbicularly from a broad basis, and in the nature of a race goal tapering to a narrow convex a-top; which is exactly the figure of the idol in India, consecrated to such an office as that heathen deity was supposed to preside over, and to which, on the borders of the Ganges especially, the Gentoo virgins are brought to undergo a kind of superficial deoration before they are presented to their husbands.