that the Veda can teach us has been learned. Far from it. Every
one of these translations has been put forward as tentative only. I
myself, though during the last thirty years I have given translations
of a number of the more important hymns, have only ventured to publish
a specimen of what I think a translation of the Veda ought to be; and
that translation, that _traduction raisonnee_ as I ventured to call
it, of twelve hymns only, fills a whole volume. We are still on the
mere surface of Vedic literature, and yet our critics are ready with
ever so many arguments why the Veda can teach us nothing as to a
primitive state of man. If they mean by primitive that which came
absolutely first, then they ask for something which they will never
get, not even if they discovered the private correspondence of Adam
and Eve, or of the first _Homo_ and _Femina sapiens_. We mean by
primitive the earliest state of man of which, from the nature of the
case, we can hope to gain any knowledge; and here, next to the
archives hidden away in the secret drawers of language, in the
treasury of words common to all the Aryan tribes, and in the radical
elements of which each word is compounded, there is no literary relic
more full of lessons to the true anthropologist, to the true student
of mankind, than the Rig-Veda.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 89: See Cunningham, "Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum," vol.
i., 1877.]

[Footnote 90: _K_ulavagga V. 33, 1. The expression used is _Kh_andaso
aropema'ti.]

[Footnote 91: See Rhys Davids, Buddhist Suttas, "Sacred Books of the
East," vol. xi., p. 142.]

[Footnote 92: The Brahmo-Samaj, a theistic school.--A. W.]

[Footnote 93: The _Liberal_, March 12, 1882.]

[Footnote 94: See R. G. Bhandarkar, Consideration of the date of the
Mahabharata, _Journal of the R. A. S. of Bombay_, 1872; Talboys
Wheeler, "History of India," ii. 365, 572; Holtzmann, "Ueber das alte
indische Epos," 1881, p. 1; Phear, "The Aryan Village in India and
Ceylon," p. 19. That the Mahabharata was publicly read in the seventh
century A.D., we learn from Ba_n_a; see _Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society_, Bombay, vol. x., p. 87, note.--A. W.]

[Footnote 95: "Hibbert Lectures," p. 157.]

[Footnote 96: "Every person acquainted with the spoken speech of India
knows perfectly well that its elevation to the dignity and usefulness
of written speech has depended, and must still depend, upon its
borrowing largely from its parent or kindred so