ed
[Greek: gephyrai] in the sense of a dam, the etymology, i. e., the
earliest history of the word, would still remain obscure and doubtful.
It is easy, again, to see that [Greek: hieros] in Greek means
something like the English sacred. But how, if it did so, the same
adjective could likewise be applied to a fish or to a chariot, is a
question which, if it is to be answered at all, can only be answered
by an etymological analysis of the word.[48] To say that sacred may
mean marvellous, and therefore big, is saying nothing, particularly as
Homer does not speak of catching big fish, but of catching fish in
general.

[Footnote 48: On [Greek: hieros], the Sanskrit ishira, lively, see
Kuhn's 'Zeitschrift,' vol. ii. p. 275, vol. iii. p. 134.]

These considerations--which might be carried much further, but which,
we are afraid, have carried us away too far from our original
subject--were suggested to us while reading a lecture lately published
by Dr. Haug, and originally delivered by him at Bombay, in 1864,
before an almost exclusively Parsi audience. In that lecture Dr. Haug
gives a new translation of ten short paragraphs of the Zend-Avesta,
which he had explained and translated in his 'Essays on the Sacred
Language of the Parsees,' published in 1862. To an ordinary reader the
difference between the two translations, published within the space of
two years, might certainly be perplexing, and calculated to shake his
faith in the soundness of a method that can lead to such varying
results. Nor can it be denied that, if scholars who are engaged in
these researches are bent on representing their last translation as
final and as admitting of no further improvement, the public has a
right to remind them that 'finality' is as dangerous a thing in
scholarship as in politics. Considering the difficulty of translating
the pages of the Zend-Avesta, we can never hope to have every sentence
of it rendered into clear and intelligible English. Those who for the
first time reduced the sacred traditions of the Zoroastrians to
writing were separated by more than a thousand years from the time of
their original composition. After that came all the vicissitudes to
which manuscripts are exposed during the process of being copied by
more or less ignorant scribes. The most ancient MSS. of the
Zend-Avesta date from the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is
true there is an early translation of the Zend-Avesta, the Pehlevi
translation, and a