But in the wide nostril of Brahma we also perceive the Cogitative form of Nose, so necessary to indicate the wisdom of Brahma, “the Creator:” who, though now he rests, having consigned the inferior office of Preservation to Vishnu, was the first emanation from the supreme Brahmè, and by whom and from whom all creation proceeded. With the exception of the head in this Trimurti, Brahma has no idolatrous representations, for it is said in the Vedas, “Of Him whose glory is so great, there is no image. He is the incomprehensible Being which illumines all, delights all, and whence all proceed.”
Sir William Jones mentions, in one of his discourses published in the Asiatic Researches, the existence of a small nation in India which appears distinct from the Hindoo race. The people comprising it he describes as shrewd, clever tradesmen, enterprising merchants, acute money-lenders, and notorious in India for their aptitude for commerce. Their countenances, he adds, are what are called Jewish, and hence he concludes that they constitute a portion of Jews, who either at the dispersion of the Ten Tribes, or at some other very early period, settled in India. It is surprising that the acute President should have so hastily jumped to such a conclusion from the foregoing premises; for he adds a fact which seems most decidedly to negative it. This people, he tells us, have not the slightest trace of any Jewish traditions, belief, or customs among them. Now it is a familiar fact that the Jews, wherever dispersed, or however long separated from their brethren, have invariably retained a very large proportion of the inspired precepts revealed to regulate their religious, moral, and social conduct; and it must demand the most precise and indisputable evidence to justify the classing any people as Jews, who have lost all traces of the manners and customs of that singular nation.
For these reasons we do not hesitate to say that the two facts on which Sir W. Jones founded his hasty hypothesis, viz. the commercial character and the Jewish physiognomy of this Asiatic tribe, afford by their coincidence only a remarkable and curious confirmation of our Nasological theory, and as such, we here gladly insert it.