h later period, and of little help to us in tracing the beginnings of
religious life in India. For that purpose we must depend entirely on the
hymns, such as we find them in the Sanhita or the collection of the
Rig-veda.

Now this collection consists of ten books, and contains altogether
1028 hymns. As early as about 600 B.C. we find that in the theological
schools of India every verse, every word, every syllable of the Veda
had been carefully counted. The number of verses as computed in
treatises of that date, varies from 10,402 to 10,622; that of the
words is 153,826, that of the syllables 432,000.[12] With these
numbers, and with the description given in these early treatises of
each hymn, of its metre, its deity, its number of verses, our modern
MSS. of the Veda correspond as closely as could be expected.

[Footnote 12: 'History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature,' second
edition, p. 219 seq.]

I say, our modern MSS., for all our MSS. are modern, and very modern.
Few Sanskrit MSS. are more than four or five hundred years old, the
fact being that in the damp climate of India no paper will last for
more than a few centuries. How then, you will naturally ask, can it be
proved that the original hymns were composed between 1200 and 1500
before the Christian era, if our MSS. only carry us back to about the
same date after the Christian era? It is not very easy to bridge over
this gulf of nearly three thousand years, but all I can say is that,
after carefully examining every possible objection that can be made
against the date of the Vedic hymns, their claim to that high
antiquity which is ascribed to them, has not, as far as I can judge,
been shaken. I shall try to explain on what kind of evidence these
claims rest.

You know that we possess no MS. of the Old Testament in Hebrew older
than about the tenth century after the Christian era; yet the
Septuagint translation by itself would be sufficient to prove that the
Old Testament, such as we now read it, existed in MS. previous, at
least, to the third century before our era. By a similar train of
argument, the works to which I referred before, in which we find every
hymn, every verse, every word and syllable of the Veda accurately
counted by native scholars about five or six hundred years before
Christ, guarantee the existence of the Veda, such as we now read it,
as far back at least as five or six hundred years before Christ. Now
in the works of that period, the Veda is