of such works have
been handed down, the _Aitareya_ and the _Kaushitaki_ (or
_Sankhayana)-Brahmanas_, which have a large amount of their material in
common. But while the former work (transl. into English by M. Haug) is
mainly taken up with the Soma-sacrifice, the latter has in addition
thereto chapters on the other forms of sacrifice. Being intended for the
Hotri's use, both these works treat exclusively of the hymns and verses
recited by that priest and his assistants, either in the form of
connected litanies or in detached verses invoking the deities to whom
oblations are made, or uttered in response to the solemn hymns chanted
by the Udgatris.

It is, however, to the Brahmanas and Sutras of the _Yajurveda_, dealing
with the ritual of the real offering-priest, the Adhvaryu, that we have
to turn for a connected view of the sacrificial procedure in all its
material details. Now, in considering the body of writings connected
with this Veda, we are at once confronted by the fact that there are two
different schools, an older and a younger one, in which the traditional
body of ritualistic matter has been treated in a very different way. For
while the younger school, the _Vajasaneyins_, have made a clear
severance between the sacred texts or mantras and the exegetic
discussions thereon--as collected in the _Vajasaneyi-samhita_ and the
_Satapatha-Brahmana_ (trans. by J. Eggeling, in _Sacred Books of the
East_) respectively--arranged systematically in accordance with the
ritual divisions, the older school on the other hand present their
materials in a hopelessly jumbled form; for not only is each type of
sacrifice not dealt with continuously and in orderly fashion, but short
textual sections of mantras are constantly followed immediately by their
dogmatic exegesis; the term _brahmana_ thus applying in their case only
to these detached comments and not to the connected series of them. Thus
the most prominent subdivision of the older school, the _Taittiriyas_,
in their _Samhita_, have treated the main portion of the ceremonial in
this promiscuous fashion, and to add to the confusion they have, by way
of supplement, put forth a so-called _Taittiriya-brahmana_, which, so
far from being a real Brahmana, merely deals with some additional rites
in the same confused mixture of sacrificial formulae and dogmatic
explanations. It is not without reason, therefore, that those two
schools, the older and the younger, are commonly called th