these details because I know that, with our ideas
of literature, it requires an effort to imagine the bare possibility
of a large amount of poetry, and still more of prose, existing in any
but a written form. And yet here too we only see what we see
elsewhere, namely that man, before the great discoveries of
civilization were made, was able by greater individual efforts to
achieve what to us, accustomed to easier contrivances, seems almost
impossible. So-called savages were able to chip flints, to get fire by
rubbing sticks of wood, which baffles our handiest workmen. Are we to
suppose that, if they wished to preserve some songs which, as they
believed, had once secured them the favor of their gods, had brought
rain from heaven, or led them on to victory, they would have found no
means of doing so? We have only to read such accounts as, for
instance, Mr. William Wyatt Gill has given us in his "Historical
Sketches of Savage Life in Polynesia,"[274] to see how anxious even
savages are to preserve the records of their ancient heroes, kings,
and gods, particularly when the dignity or nobility of certain
families depends on these songs, or when they contain what might be
called the title-deeds to large estates. And that the Vedic Indians
were not the only savages of antiquity who discovered the means of
preserving a large literature by means of oral tradition, we may learn
from Caesar,[275] not a very credulous witness, who tells us that the
"Druids were said to know a large number of verses by heart; that some
of them spent twenty years in learning them, and that they considered
it wrong to commit them to writing"--exactly the same story which we
hear in India.

We must return once more to the question of dates. We have traced the
existence of the Veda, as handed down by oral tradition, from our days
to the days of I-tsing in the seventh century after Christ, and again
to the period of the Prati_s_akhyas, in the fifth century before
Christ.

In that fifth century B.C. took place the rise of Buddhism, a religion
built up on the ruins of the Vedic religion, and founded, so to say,
on the denial of the divine authority ascribed to the Veda by all
orthodox Brahmans.

Whatever exists, therefore, of Vedic literature must be accommodated
within the centuries preceding the rise of Buddhism, and if I tell you
that there are three periods of Vedic literature to be accommodated,
the third presupposing the second, and the second t