ment and fixation as the learned tongue of all Aryan India, it must have been one among a number of somewhat differing local varieties of Aryan speech, whose differences form a part of the discordance of the later dialects, I have called it above rather their virtual than their actual progenitor: it represents very closely the primitive stock out of which they have all grown, by varying internal development, and by varying influence and admixture of foreign tongues. When and where it was at first a spoken dialect, is out of our power to determine; but it cannot well be regarded as of less age than the earliest Greek records; and it is probably older by centuries. It possesses a most abundant literature, in nearly every department save history; its religious and ethical poetry, its epics, its lyric flights, its dramas, its systems of philosophy and grammar, have been found worthy of high admiration and of profound study by Western scholars; they have even been ranked by some, though very unjustly, as superior to the masterpieces of the Greek and Latin literatures. To fix the chronology of its separate works is a task of the extremest difficulty; but some of them, even in their present form, and the substance of many others, certainly come from a time considerably anterior to the Christian era.
The Vedic dialect is yet more ancient; the earliest portions of the oldest collection, the Rig-Veda ('Veda of hymns'), must, it is believed, date from nearly or quite two thousand years before Christ. The considerations from which this age is deduced for them are of a general and inexact character, yet tolerably clear in their indications. Thus, for example, the hymns of the Vedas were chiefly composed on the banks of the Indus and its tributaries, when the great valley of the Ganges was as yet unknown to the Aryan immigrants; and they present the elephant as still a wondered-at and little-known animal: while the earliest tidings of India which we have from without show us great kingdoms on the Ganges, and the elephant reduced to the service of man, both in war and in peace. Buddhism, too, which is well known to have preceded by several centuries the birth of Christ, was a revolt against the oppressive domination of the Brahmanic
