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literary language of ancient India, by the translation and publication
of the laws of Menu. He was followed in his labors by the Schlegels of
Germany, and by numerous scholars and missionaries. Within fifty years
this ancient and beautiful language has been so perseveringly studied
that we know something of the people by whom it was once spoken,--even
as Egyptologists have revealed something of ancient Egypt by
interpreting the hieroglyphics; and Chaldaean investigators have found
stores of knowledge in the Babylonian bricks.

The Sanskrit, as now interpreted, reveals to us the meaning of those
poems called Vedas, by which we are enabled to understand the early laws
and religion of the Hindus. It is poetry, not history, which makes this
revelation, for the Hindus have no history farther back than five or six
hundred years before Christ. It is from Homer and Hesiod that we get an
idea of the gods of Greece, not from Herodotus or Xenophon.

From comparative philology, a new science, of which Prof. Max Mueller is
one of the greatest expounders, we learn that the roots of various
European languages, as well as of the Latin and Greek, are
substantially the same as those of the Sanskrit spoken by the Hindus
thirty-five hundred years ago, from which it is inferred that the Hindus
were a people of like remote origin with the Greeks, the Italic races
(Romans, Italians, French), the Slavic races (Russian, Polish,
Bohemian), the Teutonic races of England and the Continent, and the
Keltic races. These are hence alike called the Indo-European races; and
as the same linguistic roots are found in their languages and in the
Zend-Avesta, we infer that the ancient Persians, or inhabitants of Iran,
belonged to the same great Aryan race.

The original seat of this race, it is supposed, was in the high
table-lands of Central Asia, in or near Bactria, east of the Caspian
Sea, and north and west of the Himalaya Mountains. This country was so
cold and sterile and unpropitious that winter predominated, and it was
difficult to support life. But the people, inured to hardship and
privation, were bold, hardy, adventurous, and enterprising.

It is a most interesting process, as described by the philologists,
which has enabled them, by tracing the history of words through their
various modifications in different living languages, to see how the
lines of growth converge as they are followed back to the simple Aryan
roots. And there, getting at