ORIENTAL SCHOLARSHIP DURING THE PRESENT CENTURY. 687 



as real as the battle of Waterloo. They form the solid foundation of 

 all later history. They determine the course of the principal nations 

 of ancient history as the mountains determine the course of rivers. 

 Try only to realize what is meant by the fact that there was a time and 

 there was a place where the ancestors of the poets of the Veda and of 

 the prophets of the Zend Avesta shook hands and conversed freely with 

 the ancestors of Homer, nay, with our own linguistic ancestors, and 

 you will see what a shiftiuii,' of scenery, what a real transformation 

 scene Oriental students have produced on the historical stage of the 

 world. They have brought together the most valuable and yet the 

 least expensive museum of antiquities, namely, the words which date 

 from the time of an undivided Aryan and an undivided Semitic broth- 

 erhood ; relics older than all Babylonian tablets or Egyptian papyri ; 

 relics of their common thoughts, their common religion, their common 

 mythology, their common folk-lore, nay, as has lately beeji shown 

 by Leist, Kohler, and others, relics of their common jurisprudence 

 also. - - - 



At the present moment, when the whole world is preparing for the 

 celebration of the discovery of America, or what is called the New 

 World, let us not forget that the discoverers of that old, that prehis- 

 toric world of which I have been speaking, deserve our gratitude as 

 much as Columbus and his companions. The discrveries of Sir William 

 Jones, Schlegel, Humboldt, and of my own masters and fellow-workers, 

 Bopp, Pott, Burnouf, Benfey, Kuhn, and Curtius, will forever remain 

 a landmark in the studies devoted to the history, that is, the knowl- 

 edge of our race, and, in the end, the knowledge of ourselves. If 

 others have followed in their footsteps and have proved that these 

 bold discoverers have sometimes been on a wrong track let them have 

 full credit for what they have added, for what they have corrected, and 

 what they have rejected; but a ]Moses who tights his way through the 

 wilderness, though he dies before he enters on the full possession of 

 the promised land, is greater than all the Joshuas that cross the Jor- 

 dan and divide the land. Many travellers now tind their way easily to 

 Africa and back; but the first who toiled alone to discover the sources 

 of the Nile, men such as Burton, Speke, and Liviugs.tone, required 

 often greater faith and greater pluck than those who actually dis- 

 covered them. As long as I live I shall protest against all attempts 

 to belittle the true founders of the Science of Language. Their ^•ery 

 mistakes often display more genius than the corrections of their 

 Epigoni. 



It may be said that this great discovery of a whole act in the drama 

 of the world, the very existence of which was unknown to our fore- 

 fathers, was due to the study of the Science of Language rather than to 

 Oriental scholarship. But where would the Science of Language have 

 been without the students of Sanskrit and Zend, of Hebrew and Arabic? 

 At a Congress of Ovientaljsts we have a right to claim what is due to 



