of the Government, have shrunk dismayed; that we have taken
upon ourselves a work which has proved to be beyond the capacities of
the Royal Asiatic Society.

Let it be so.

Let everyone try to remember, as we ourselves remember, that not very
long ago a poor Hungarian, who not only had no means of any kind but was
almost a beggar, traveled on foot to Tibet through unknown and dangerous
countries, led only by the love of learning and the eager wish to
pour light on the historical origin of his nation. The result was that
inexhaustible mines of literary treasures were discovered. Philology,
which till then had wandered in the Egyptian darkness of etymological
labyrinths, and was about to ask the sanction of the scientific world
to one of the wildest of theories, suddenly stumbled on the clue of
Ariadne. Philology discovered, at last, that the Sanskrit language is,
if not the forefather, at least--to use the language of Max Muller--"the
elder brother" of all classical languages. Thanks to the extraordinary
zeal of Alexander Csoma de Koros, Tibet yielded a language the
literature of which was totally unknown. He partly translated it and
partly analyzed and explained it. His translations have shown the
scientific world that (1) the originals of the Zend-Avesta, the sacred
scriptures of the sun-worshippers, of Tripitaka, that of the Buddhists,
and of Aytareya-Brahmanam, that of the Brahmans, were written in one and
the same Sanskrit language; (2) that all these three languages--Zend,
Nepalese, and the modern Brahman Sanskrit--are more or less dialects of
the first; (3) that old Sanskrit is the origin of all the less ancient
Indo-European languages, as well as of the modern European
tongues and dialects; (4) that the three chief religions of
heathendom--Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Brahmanism--are mere heresies
of the monotheistic teachings of the Vedas, which does not prevent them
from being real ancient religions and not modern falsifications.

The moral of all this is evident. A poor traveler, without either money
or protection, succeeded in gaining admittance to the Lamaseries of
Tibet and to the sacred literature of the isolated tribe which inhabits
it, probably because he treated the Mongolians and the Tibetans as
his brothers and not as an inferior race--a feat which has never been
accomplished by generations of scientists. One cannot help feeling
ashamed of humanity and science when one thinks that he whose labors
f