palpably." I have long preached this in vain. All who have studied the
Rigveda say this, and all who have not studied it say just the contrary,
and lay especial stress upon the fact that these hymns contain ideas that
once and for all they declare as modern. But no one has ever contended
that this is not so. What is historically the oldest, may from a higher
point of view be quite modern, and there are scholars who even look upon
Adam as a reformer of mankind. Those who best know the Rigveda have often
shown that it stands at a tolerably advanced stage, and here and there
casts a distant glance into its own past. I myself have often said that I
would give much if I could escape from my own proofs of the age of this
collection of hymns, and could clearly show that at least some of these
Vedic hymns had been added later.

These hymns, therefore, just because, judging from their language and
metre, they are older than everything else in India, or even in the entire
Aryan world, and because they are mainly concerned with the ancient gods
of nature, appeared to the Hindus themselves as _apaurusheya_, that is,
not wrought by man. They were called _S_ruti, (that which was heard), in
distinction from other literature, which was designated as Sm_ri_ti, or
recollection.

All this is easily intelligible. There followed a period, however, during
which the true understanding of the hymns became considerably obscured,
and a new series of works, the so-called Brahma_n_as, arose. These were
very different from the hymns. They are composed in a younger language and
in prose. They treat of the sacrifice, so full of significance in India,
at which the hymns were employed, and which seems to me to have been
originally designed for measuring time, and thus served to mark the
progress of civilisation. They explain the meaning of the hymns, often
quite erroneously; but they contain some interesting information upon the
condition of India, long after the period when the hymns first appeared,
and yet before the rise of Buddhism in the sixth century before Christ. It
has been supposed that, as the Brahma_n_as were composed in prose, they
were originally written, according to the hypothesis of Wolf, that prose
everywhere presupposes the knowledge of writing. I cannot admit this in
the case of India; at any rate, there is no trace of any acquaintance with
writing in the whole of this extensive mass of literature. It was
throughout a mnemonic liter