general grounds. Admitting that
the Jews began with sacrifice and ended with psalms, it would by no
means follow that the Aryan nations did the same, nor would the
chronological arrangement of the ancient literature of China help us
much in forming an opinion of the growth of the Indian mind. We must
take each nation by itself, and try to find out what they themselves
hold as to the relative antiquity of their literary documents. On
general grounds, the problem whether sacrifice or prayer comes first,
may be argued ad infinitum, just like the problem whether the hen
comes first or the egg. In the special case of the sacred literature
of the Brahmans, we must be guided by their own tradition, which
invariably places the poetical hymns of the Rig-veda before the
ceremonial hymns and formulas of the Ya_g_ur-veda and Sama-veda. The
strongest argument that has as yet been brought forward against this
view is, that the formulas of the Ya_g_ur-veda and the sacrificial
texts of the Sama-veda contain occasionally more archaic forms of
language than the hymns of the Rig-veda. It was supposed, therefore,
that, although the hymns of the Rig-veda might have been composed at
an earlier time, the sacrificial hymns and formulas were the first to
be collected and to be preserved in the schools by means of a strict
mnemonic discipline. The hymns of the Rig-veda, some of which have no
reference whatever to the Vedic ceremonial, being collected at a later
time, might have been stripped, while being handed down by oral
tradition, of those grammatical forms which in the course of time had
become obsolete, but which, if once recognised and sanctioned in
theological seminaries, would have been preserved there with the most
religious care.

According to Dr. Haug, the period during which the Vedic hymns were
composed extends from 1400 to 2000 B.C. The oldest hymns, however, and
the sacrificial formulas he would place between 2000 and 2400 B.C.
This period, corresponding to what has been called the _K_handas and
Mantra periods, would be succeeded by the Brahma_n_a period, and Dr.
Haug would place the bulk of the Brahma_n_as, all written in prose,
between 1400 and 1200 B.C. He does not attribute much weight to the
distinction made by the Brahmans themselves between revealed and
profane literature, and would place the Sutras almost contemporaneous
with the Brahma_n_as. The only fixed point from which he starts in his
chronological arrangement is t