the place of Dyaus, the sky, and
P_ri_thivi, the earth, is his wife. In other places,[241] however, he
is the son of Dyaus or the sky, though no thought is given in that
early stage to the fact that thus Par_g_anya might seem to be the
husband of his mother. We saw that even the idea of Indra being the
father of his own father did not startle the ancient poets beyond an
exclamation that it was a very wonderful thing indeed.

Sometimes Par_g_anya does the work of Indra,[242] the Jupiter Pluvius
of the Veda; sometimes of Vayu, the wind, sometimes of Soma, the giver
of rain. Yet with all this he is not Dyaus, nor Indra, nor the Maruts,
nor Vayu, nor Soma. He stands by himself, a separate person, a
separate god, as we should say--nay, one of the oldest of all the
Aryan gods.

His name, par_g_anya, is derived from a root par_g_, which, like its
parallel forms pars and parsh, must (I think) have had the meaning of
sprinkling, irrigating, moistening. An interchange between final _g_,
_s_, and sh, may, no doubt, seem unusual, but it is not without parallel
in Sanskrit. We have, for instance, the roots pi_ng_, pingere; pish, to
rub; pi_s_, to adorn (as in pe_s_as, [Greek: poikilos], etc.); m_rig_,
to rub, m_ri_sh, to rub out, to forget; m_ris_, mulcere.

This very root m_rig_ forms its participle as m_ri_sh-_t_a, like
ya_g_, ish_t_a, and vi_s_, vish_t_a; nay there are roots, such as
druh, which optionally take a final lingual or guttural, such as
dhru_t_ and dhruk.[243]

We may therefore compare par_g_ in par_g_anya with such words as
p_ri_shata, p_ri_shati, speckled, drop of water;[244] also par_s_u,
cloud, p_ris_ni, speckled, cloud, earth; and in Greek [Greek: prox(o)],
[Greek: perknos], etc.[245]

If derived from par_g_, to sprinkle, Par_g_anya would have meant
originally "he who irrigates or gives rain."[246]

When the different members of the Aryan family dispersed, they might
all of them, Hindus as well as Greeks and Celts, and Teutons and
Slaves, have carried that name for cloud with them. But you know that
it happened very often that out of the commonwealth of their ancient
language, one and the same word was preserved, as the case might be,
not by all, but by only six, or five, or four, or three, or two, or
even by one only of the seven principal heirs; and yet, as we know
that there was no historical contact between them, after they had once
parted from each other, long before the beginning of what we call
hist