at the early age of eight or ten or twelve, and for twelve years or more to remain in their teacher's house, doing menial service under him, begging alms for him, and learning the ancestral religion by rote. The diffuse details of the Brahmanas were therefore compressed into short treatises in order that they might be imparted and learnt with ease, and a separate body of Sutras was thus composed for each Sutra-charana or school. The names of the authors of many of these compositions have been handed down to us, and while the Vedas and the Brahmanas are declared to be revealed, no such claim is put forward for the Sutras, which are admitted to be human compositions. The so-called revealed literature of India closes, therefore, with the Upanishads, which form the last portions of the Brahmanas.
When the composition of Sutras had once begun, the system spread rapidly all over India, and Sutra schools multiplied. The Charanyavyuha names five Charanas of the Rig-Veda, twenty-seven of the Black Yajur-Veda, fifteen of the White Yajur-Veda, twelve of the Sama-Veda, and nine of the Atharva-Veda. A vast mass of Sutra literature thus gradually sprang up in India, but of the Sutras which must have been composed and taught in these numerous Sutra-charanas comparatively few have survived. The Sutra literature falls into three great classes, dealing respectively with religion (Srauta Sutras), law (Dharma Sutras), and domestic life (Grihya Sutras). Of these the earliest were the Sutras connected with religion and consisting
