coincidences between the legends of India and the legends of the West,
without as yet being able to say how they travelled, whether from East
to West, or from West to East. That at the time of Solomon there was a
channel of communication open between India and Syria and Palestine is
established beyond doubt, I believe, by certain Sanskrit words which
occur in the Bible as names of articles of export from Ophir, articles
such as ivory, apes, peacocks, and sandalwood, which, taken together,
could not have been exported from any country but India.[7] Nor is
there any reason to suppose that the commercial intercourse between
India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean was ever
completely interrupted, even at the time when the Book of Kings is
supposed to have been written.

Now you remember the judgment of Solomon, which has always been
admired as a proof of great legal wisdom among the Jews.[8] I must
confess that, not having a legal mind, I never could suppress a
certain shudder[9] when reading the decision of Solomon: "Divide the
living child in two, and give half to the one, and half to the other."

Let me now tell you the same story as it is told by the Buddhists,
whose sacred Canon is full of such legends and parables. In the
Kanjur, which is the Tibetan translation of the Buddhist Tripi_t_aka,
we likewise read of two women who claimed each to be the mother of the
same child. The king, after listening to their quarrels for a long
time, gave it up as hopeless to settle who was the real mother. Upon
this Vi_s_akha stepped forward and said: "What is the use of examining
and cross-examining these women? Let them take the boy and settle it
among themselves." Thereupon both women fell on the child, and when
the fight became violent the child was hurt and began to cry. Then one
of them let him go, because she could not bear to hear the child cry.

That settled the question. The king gave the child to the true mother,
and had the other beaten with a rod.

This seems to me, if not the more primitive, yet the more natural form
of the story--showing a deeper knowledge of human nature and more
wisdom than even the wisdom of Solomon.[10]

Many of you may have studied not only languages, but also the Science
of Language, and is there any country in which some of the most
important problems of that science, say only the growth and decay of
dialects, or the possible mixture of languages, with regard not only
to