ncestors
in the great historical kingdoms of the world; let us be grateful for
all we have inherited from Egyptians, Babylonians, Phoenicians,
Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Saxons. But why bring in India? Why add a
new burden to what every man has to bear already, before he can call
himself fairly educated? What have we inherited from the dark dwellers
on the Indus and the Ganges, that we should have to add their royal
names and dates and deeds to the archives of our already overburdened
memory?

There is some justice in this complaint. The ancient inhabitants of
India are not our intellectual ancestors in the same direct way as
Jews, Greeks, Romans, and Saxons are; but they represent,
nevertheless, a collateral branch of that family to which we belong by
language, that is, by thought, and their historical records extend in
some respects so far beyond all other records and have been preserved
to us in such perfect and such legible documents, that we can learn
from them lessons which we can learn nowhere else, and supply missing
links in our intellectual ancestry far more important than that
missing link (which we can well afford to miss), the link between Ape
and Man.

I am not speaking as yet of the literature of India as it is, but of
something far more ancient, the language of India, or Sanskrit. No one
supposes any longer that Sanskrit was the common source of Greek,
Latin, and Anglo-Saxon. This used to be said, but it has long been
shown that Sanskrit is only a collateral branch of the same stem from
which spring Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon; and not only these, but
all the Teutonic, all the Celtic, all the Slavonic languages, nay, the
languages of Persia and Armenia also.

What, then, is it that gives to Sanskrit its claim on our attention,
and its supreme importance in the eyes of the historian?

First of all, its antiquity--for we know Sanskrit at an earlier period
than Greek. But what is far more important than its merely
chronological antiquity is the antique state of preservation in which
that Aryan language has been handed down to us. The world had known
Latin and Greek for centuries, and it was felt, no doubt, that there
was some kind of similarity between the two. But how was that
similarity to be explained? Sometimes Latin was supposed to give the
key to the formation of a Greek word, sometimes Greek seemed to betray
the secret of the origin of a Latin word. Afterward, when the ancient
Teutonic languag