of its ancient
literature, and, more particularly, of its ancient religion. My object
was, not merely to place names and facts before you, these you can
find in many published books, but, if possible, to make you see and
feel the general human interests that are involved in that ancient
chapter of the history of the human race. I wished that the Veda and
its religion and philosophy should not only seem to you curious or
strange, but that you should feel that there was in them something
that concerns ourselves, something of our own intellectual growth,
some recollections, as it were, of our own childhood, or at least of
the childhood of our own race. I feel convinced that, placed as we are
here in this life, we have lessons to learn from the Veda, quite as
important as the lessons we learn at school from Homer and Virgil, and
lessons from the Vedanta quite as instructive as the systems of Plato
or Spinoza.

I do not mean to say that everybody who wishes to know how the human
race came to be what it is, how language came to be what it is, how
religion came to be what it is, how manners, customs, laws, and forms
of government came to be what they are, how we ourselves came to be
what we are, must learn Sanskrit, and must study Vedic Sanskrit. But I
_do_ believe that not to know what a study of Sanskrit, and
particularly a study of the Veda, has already done for illuminating
the darkest passages in the history of the human mind, of that mind on
which we ourselves are feeding and living, is a misfortune, or, at all
events, a loss, just as I should count it a loss to have passed
through life without knowing something, however little, of the
geological formation of the earth, or of the sun, and the moon, and
the stars--and of the thought, or the will, or the law, that govern
their movements.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 260: On the early use of letters for public inscriptions,
see Hayman, _Journal of Philology_, 1879, pp. 141, 142, 150; Hicks,
"Manual of Greek Historical Inscriptions," pp. 1 seqq.]

[Footnote 261: Herod, (v. 59) says: "I saw Phenician letters on
certain tripods in a temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes in
Boeotia, the most of them like the Ionian letters."]

[Footnote 262: Munch, "Die Nordisch Germanischen Voelker," p. 240.]

[Footnote 263: Herod. (v. 58) says: "The Ionians from of old call
[Greek: byblos diphtherai], because once, in default of the former, they
used to employ the latter. And even down t