gg Annual Report. [Feb. 



saneyi school, a Avork full of difficult discussions on intricate points of 



Vedic ritual. 



Tlie oldest and most important Vedic book, the Rg-Veda, was 

 entrusted to Max Miiller. It has already been related how he found 

 nu opportunity of publishing such a voluminous work. As he himself 

 tells us, during the time he was engaged with this task, from 1850 up 

 to 1875, he had to prepare for the press in each year 35 formes in lavj^e 

 quarto size of a text full of intricate matter, requiring a thornu<.'h mas- 

 tery of the language as well as of all other points connected with its 

 interpretation. His edition of the Rg-Veda, which was published a 

 second time some yeajs ago, is universally acknowledged to be a stand- 

 ard work of its kind; and at present, wheie the interpretation of the 

 often obscure hymns of the Vedic Rsis tends to vindicate to the com- 

 mentaiy of Sayana a greater value than originally had been given 

 to it he will be thanked for having spared no trouble in completing the 

 often tedious task of preparing an edition of the entire commentary, 

 instead of giving only abstracts, as had been done in similar cases. 



Miiller's next valuable publication in the same branch is his 

 History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature. In this book he attempts to 

 lay open the subsequent strata of the vast bulk of Vedic writings. He 

 begins with the latest of tlieni, the Siitras, or ritualistic manuals, and 

 shows how this class of literature presupposes an older one, the 

 Bralimanas, devoted to speculations on the various sections of the 

 sacrifice, and on the meaning of the spells used in connexion with it. 

 The Brahnianas, again, had before them collections of mantras or spells, 

 which must go back to a remoter time, and these collections of mantras 

 often exhibit a misunderstood and conventional use of hymns, which 

 Lad been composed in a previous time, the period to which the ohlest 

 parts of Vedic literature go back. He thus distinguishes between 

 four consecutive periods, which, in the order they followed one another, 

 he calls the c7i(j)/(?fis-period or the period in which the Vedic hymns 

 were composed, the vmntra--pev'iod or the period in which they were 

 put together into collections intended for sacrificial purposes, the 

 In <lhmnn(i--pev\od or the period of sacinficial speculation, and the 

 s?7/ra-period or the period in which correct rules for the ritual 

 were laid down. To each of these periods he attributes a ceitain 

 amount of time, and starting from the supposition that the latest, or 

 Sutra period, had come to a close some hundred years before the rise of 

 Buddliism, he arrives at the year 1500 B.C. as the approximate 

 beginning of Vedic literature. It has recently been attempted, on the 

 strength of astronomical data contained in the Veda, to push this time 

 about two thousand years further back, but these attempts cannot be 



