eas. The "self-supporting principle beneath and energy
aloft" may refer, as Dr. Muir suggests, to the father, heaven above, and
the mother, earth beneath. The "bond between entity and non-entity" is
sought in a favourite idea of the Indian philosophers, that of tapas or
"fervour". The other speculations remind us, though they are much more
restrained and temperate in character, of the metaphysical chants of the
New Zealand priests, of the Zunis, of Popol Vuh, and so on. These belong
to very early culture.

What is the relative age of this hymn? If it could be proved to be the
oldest in the Veda, it would demonstrate no more than this, that in time
exceedingly remote the Aryans of India possessed a philosopher, perhaps
a school of philosophers, who applied the minds to abstract speculations
on the origin of things. It could not prove that mythological
speculations had not preceded the attempts of a purer philosophy. But
the date cannot be ascertained. Mr. Max Muller cannot go farther than
the suggestion that the hymn is an expression of the perennis quaedam
philosophia of Leibnitz. We are also warned that a hymn is not
necessarily modern because it is philosophical.(1) Certainly that
is true; the Zunis, Maoris, and Mangaians exhibit amazing powers of
abstract thought. We are not concerned to show that this hymn is late;
but it seems almost superfluous to remark that ideas like those which it
contains can scarcely be accepted as expressing man's earliest theory
of the origin of all things. We turn from such ideas to those which the
Aryans of India have in common with black men and red men, with far-off
Finns and Scandinavians, Chaldaeans, Haidahs, Cherokees, Murri and
Maori, Mangaians and Egyptians.

(1) History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 568.

The next Vedic account of creation which we propose to consider is as
remote as possible in character from the sublime philosophic poem. In
the Purusha Sukta, the ninetieth hymn of the tenth book of the Rig-Veda
Sanhita, we have a description of the creation of all things out of the
severed limbs of a magnified non-natural man, Purusha. This conception
is of course that which occurs in the Norse myths of the rent body
of Ymir. Borr's sons took the body of the Giant Ymir and of his flesh
formed the earth, of his blood seas and waters, of his bones mountains,
of his teeth rocks and stones, of his hair all manner of plants, of his
skull the firmament, of his brains the clouds, a