w forth in the volumes of the "Asiatic Researches"
and the numbers of the "Asiatic Journal." The conclusion was that,
while Du Perron had indeed betrayed partial ignorance and crudity,
and had committed some glaring errors, there was not the least
ground for doubt that his asserted discovery was in every
essential what it claimed to be. It is a sort of litany; a
collection of prayers and of sacred dialogues held between Ormuzd
and Zoroaster, from which the Persian system of theology may be
inferred and constructed with some approach to completeness.

The assailants of the genuineness of the "Zend Avesta" were
effectually silenced when, some thirty years later, Professor
Rask, a well known Danish linguist, during his inquiries in the
East, found other copies of it, and gave to the world such
information and proofs as could not be suspected. He, discovering
the close affinities of the Zend with Sanscrit, led the way to the
most brilliant triumph yet achieved by comparative philology.
Portions of the work in the original character were published in
1829, under the supervision of Burnouf at Paris and of Olshausen
at Hamburg. The question of the genuineness of the dialect
exhibited in these specimens, once so freely mooted, has been
discussed, and definitively settled in the affirmative, by several
eminent scholars, among whom may be mentioned Bopp, whose
"Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend,
Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, and German Languages" is an
astonishing monument of erudition and toil. It is the conviction
of Major Rawlinson that the Zoroastrian books of the Parsees were
imported to Bombay from Persia in their present state in the
seventh century of our era, but that they were written at least
twelve centuries earlier.1

But the two scholars whose opinions upon any subject within this
department of learning are now the most authoritative are
Professor Spiegel of Erlangen, and Professor Westergaard of
Copenhagen. Their investigations, still in progress, made with all
the aids furnished by their predecessors, and also with the
advantage of newly discovered materials and processes, are of
course to be relied on in preference to the earlier, and in some
respects necessarily cruder, researches. It appears that the
proper Zoroastrian Scriptures namely, the Yasna, the Vispered, the
Vendidad, the Yashts, the Nyaish, the Afrigans, the Gahs, the
Sirozah, and a few other fragments were composed in an ancient
Irani