as
undertaken and successfully completed by Barnabe Brisson. A nearer
approach to the original source was made in the following century by
Italian, English, and French travellers in Asia. Pietro della Valle,
Henry Lord, Mandelslo, Ovington, Chardin, Gabriel du Chinon, and
Tavernier, found Zoroaster's last followers in Persia and India, and
made known their existence, their manners, and the main features of
their belief to Europe. Gabriel du Chinon saw their books and recognized
that they were not all written in the same language, their original holy
writ being no longer understood except by means of translations and
commentaries in another tongue.

In the year 1700, a professor at Oxford, Thomas Hyde, the greatest
Orientalist of his time in Europe, made the first systematic attempt to
restore the history of the old Persian religion by combining the
accounts of the Mohammedan writers with "the true and genuine monuments
of ancient Persia." Unfortunately the so-called genuine monuments of
ancient Persia were nothing more than recent Persian compilations or
refacimenti. But notwithstanding this defect, which could hardly be
avoided then, and a distortion of critical acumen, the book of Thomas
Hyde was the first complete and true picture of modern Parsiism, and it
made inquiry into its history the order of the day. A warm appeal made
by him to the zeal of travellers, to seek for and procure at any price
the sacred books of the Parsis, did not remain ineffectual, and from
that time scholars bethought themselves of studying Parsiism in its own
home.

Eighteen years later, a countryman of Hyde, George Boucher, received
from the Parsis in Surat a copy of the Vendidad Sada, which was brought
to England in 1723 by Richard Cobbe. But the old manuscript was a sealed
book, and the most that could then be made of it was to hang it by an
iron chain to the wall of the Bodleian Library, as a curiosity to be
shown to foreigners. A few years later, a Scotchman, named Fraser, went
to Surat, with the view of obtaining from the Parsis, not only their
books, but also a knowledge of their contents. He was not very
successful in the first undertaking, and utterly failed in the second.

In 1754 a young man, twenty years old, Anquetil Duperron, a scholar of
the _Ecole des Langues Orientales_ in Paris, happened to see a
fac-simile of four leaves of the Oxford Vendidad, which had been sent
from England, a few years before, to Etienne Fourmont, t