Vaidik form Ushasa is proved to be of high antiquity by
the nearly corresponding Latin form Aurora. Declension and conjugation
are richer in forms and more unsettled in their usage. It was a
curious fact, for instance, that no subjunctive mood existed in the
common Sanskrit. The Greeks and Romans had it, and even the language
of the Avesta showed clear traces of it. There could be no doubt that
the Sanskrit also once possessed this mood, and at last it was
discovered in the hymns of the Rig-veda. Discoveries of this kind may
seem trifling, but they are as delightful to the grammarian as the
appearance of a star, long expected and calculated, is to the
astronomer. They prove that there is natural order in language, and
that by a careful induction laws can be established which enable us to
guess with great probability either at the form or meaning of words
where but scanty fragments of the tongue itself have come down to us.

_October, 1853._

THE ZEND-AVESTA.

By means of laws like that of the Correspondence of Letters,
discovered by Rask and Grimm, it has been possible to determine the
exact form of words in Gothic, in cases where no trace of them
occurred in the literary documents of the Gothic nation. Single words
which were not to be found in Ulfilas have been recovered by applying
certain laws to their corresponding forms in Latin or Old High-German,
and thus retranslating them into Gothic. But a much greater conquest
was achieved in Persia. Here comparative philology has actually had to
create and reanimate all the materials of language on which it was
afterwards to work. Little was known of the language of Persia and
Media previous to the Shahnameh of Firdusi, composed about 1000 A.D.,
and it is due entirely to the inductive method of comparative
philology that we have now before us contemporaneous documents of
three periods of Persian language, deciphered, translated, and
explained. We have the language of the Zoroastrians, the language of
the Achaemenians, and the language of the Sassanians, which represent
the history of the Persian tongue in three successive periods--all now
rendered intelligible by the aid of comparative philology, while but
fifty years ago their very name and existence were questioned.

The labours of Anquetil Duperron, who first translated the
Zend-Avesta, were those of a bold adventurer--not of a scholar. Rask
was the first who, with the materials collected by Duperron and
himself