e know; I look upon you as myself grown young again."
And he did help me, as only a father can help his son.

Perhaps he expected too much from the Veda, as many other people did
at that time, and before the _verba ipsissima_ were printed. As the
oldest book that ever was composed, the Veda was supposed to give us a
picture of what man was in his most primitive state, with his most
primitive ideas, and his most primitive language. Everybody interested
in the origin and the first development of language, thought,
religion, and social institutions, looked forward to the Veda as a new
revelation. All such dreams, natural enough before the Veda was known,
were dispersed by my laying sacrilegious hands on the Veda itself, and
actually publishing it, making it public property, to the dismay of
the Brahmans in India, and to the delight of all Sanskrit scholars in
Europe. The learned essays of Colebrooke in India, and the extracts
published by Rosen, the Oriental librarian of the British Museum,
might indeed have taught people that the Veda was not a book without
any antecedents, that it would not tell us the secrets of Adam and
Eve, or of Deukalion and Pyrrha. I myself had both said and written
that the Veda, like an old oak tree, shows hundreds and thousands of
circles within circles; and yet I was afterwards held responsible for
having excited the wildest hopes among archaeologists, when I had done
my best, if not to destroy them, at all events to reduce them to their
proper level. Schelling seemed quite disappointed when I showed him
some of the translations of the hymns of the Rig-veda; and Bunsen,
who was still under Schelling's influence, had evidently expected a
great many more of such philosophical hymns as the famous one
beginning:

"There was not nought nor was there aught at that time."

To the scholar, no doubt, the Veda remained and always will remain the
oldest of real books, that has been preserved to us in an almost
miraculous way. By book, however, as I often explained, I mean a book
divided into chapters and verses, having a beginning and an end, and
handed down to us in an alphabetic form of writing. China may have
possessed older books in a half phonetic, half symbolic writing; Egypt
certainly possessed older hieroglyphic inscriptions and papyri;
Babylon had its cuneiform monuments; and certain portions of the Old
Testament may have existed in a written form at the time of Josiah,
when Hilkiah, the high