sound still more startling, and yet is a fact that can easily be
ascertained by anybody who doubts it--at the present moment, if every
MS. of the Rig-Veda were lost, we should be able to recover the whole
of it--from the memory of the _S_rotriyas in India. These native
students learn the Veda by heart, and they learn it from the mouth of
their Guru, never from a MS., still less from my printed edition--and
after a time they teach it again to their pupils.

I have had such students in my room at Oxford, who not only could
repeat these hymns, but who repeated them with the proper accents (for
the Vedic Sanskrit has accents like Greek), nay, who, when looking
through my printed edition of the Rig-Veda, could point out a misprint
without the slightest hesitation.

I can tell you more. There are hardly any various readings in our MSS.
of the Rig-Veda, but various schools in India have their own readings
of certain passages, and they hand down those readings with great
care. So, instead of collating MSS., as we do in Greek and Latin, I
have asked some friends of mine to collate those Vedic students, who
carry their own Rig-Veda in their memory, and to let me have the
various readings from these living authorities.

Here then we are not dealing with theories, but with facts, which
anybody may verify. The whole of the Rig-Veda, and a great deal more,
still exists at the present moment in the oral tradition of a number
of scholars who, if they liked, could write down every letter, and
every accent, exactly as we find them in our old MSS. Of course, this
learning by heart is carried on under a strict discipline; it is, in
fact, considered as a sacred duty. A native friend of mine, himself a
very distinguished Vedic scholar, tells me that a boy, who is to be
brought up as a student of the Rig-Veda, has to spend about eight
years in the house of his teacher. He has to learn ten books: first,
the hymns of the Rig-Veda; then a prose treatise on sacrifices, called
the Brahma_n_a; then the so-called Forest-book or Ara_n_yaka; then the
rules on domestic ceremonies; and lastly, six treatises on
pronunciation, grammar, etymology, metre, astronomy, and ceremonial.

These ten books, it has been calculated, contain nearly 30,000 lines,
each line reckoned as thirty-two syllables.

A pupil studies every day during the eight years of his theological
apprenticeship, except on the holidays, which are called "non-reading
days." There being 36