thread which unites
us in our thoughts and words with those who first thought for us, with
those who first spoke for us, and whose thoughts and words men are
still thinking and speaking, though divided from them by thousands, it
may be by hundreds of thousands of years.

This is what I call _history_ in the true sense of the word, something
really worth knowing, far more so than the scandals of courts, or the
butcheries of nations, which fill so many pages of our Manuals of
History. And all this work is only beginning, and whoever likes to
labor in these the most ancient of historical archives will find
plenty of discoveries to make--and yet people ask, What is the use of
learning Sanskrit?

We get accustomed to everything, and cease to wonder at what would
have startled our fathers and upset all their stratified notions,
like a sudden earthquake. Every child now learns at school that
English is an Aryan or Indo-European language, that it belongs to the
Teutonic branch, and that this branch, together with the Italic,
Greek, Celtic, Slavonic, Iranic, and Indic branches, all spring from
the same stock, and form together the great Aryan or Indo-European
family of speech.

But this, though it is taught now in our elementary schools, was
really, but fifty years ago, like the opening of a new horizon of the
world of the intellect, and the extension of a feeling of closest
fraternity that made us feel at home where before we had been
strangers, and changed millions of so-called barbarians into our own
kith and kin. To speak the same language constitutes a closer union
than to have drunk the same milk; and Sanskrit, the ancient language
of India, is substantially the same language as Greek, Latin, and
Anglo-Saxon. This is a lesson which we should never have learned but
from a study of Indian language and literature, and if India had
taught us nothing else, it would have taught us more than almost any
other language ever did.

It is quite amusing, though instructive also, to read what was written
by scholars and philosophers when this new light first dawned on the
world. They would not have it, they would not believe that there could
be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and
the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholar scouted the
idea, and I myself still remember the time, when I was a student at
Leipzig, and began to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks
on Sanskrit or compa