9 z THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



India. The occasional mention of Aryan enemies may be partly 

 reminiscences or records of an earlier time and partly references 

 to intertribal warfares, of which there was evidently no lack. It 

 must be borne in mind that all the Vedic hymns appear to have 

 been composed in northern India, and principally in the region 

 now known as the Panjab. In none of these poetical productions 

 do we find any distinct remembrance of a trans-Himalayan origin 

 or any definite allusion to a former residence outside of India. 

 This circumstance proves that at the time of the supposed migra- 

 tion from the North the ancestors of the Indo- Aryans must have 

 been rude barbarians, destitute not only of written records, but 

 also of the ability to preserve and transmit from generation to 

 generation traditions of great events in their own tribal or na- 

 tional history. The savage has a short memory for whatever lies 

 beyond the sphere of his individual experience. 



One of Zarathustra's chief injunctions was to " listen to the 

 soul of the earth," and to "'succor and foster the life of Nature." 

 This is to be done by cultivating and fertilizing the soil ; since 

 the increase of its productivity augments the sum of vitality in 

 the world and contributes to the ascendency of the vohumano or 

 good mind, synonymous with vis vitalis or living force, and aids 

 in securing the supremacy of Ahuramazda. Instead of bowing 

 down in servile fear before the phenomena of Nature, the Maz- 

 dayasnians are directed to revere and cherish her kindly and 

 beneficent spirit, so that " the wilderness and the solitary place 

 shall be glad for them, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as 

 the rose." 



Angro-Mainyush and his satellites, the devas, on the other 

 hand, are constantly striving to resist and to thwart this purpose 

 and to keep the earth in her native state of virginal wildness and 

 ruggedness by investing her with the dread sanctities and super- 

 stitions of a crude polytheistic physiolatry, by assaulting and 

 ravaging the cultivated settlements of the Ahuryan agricult- 

 urists, and by fomenting and fostering the spirit of primeval sav- 

 agery, personified as Akemmano, or the evil mind. In the sacred 

 books and traditions of both factions, and more especially in 

 those of the reformatory party, are frequent traces of this social 

 rupture and religious schism, and of the deadly hostility natu- 

 rally existing between nomadic hordes, that still adhere to a life 

 of pasturage and pillage, and men of more advanced ideas, who 

 dwell in fixed habitations (gaethas) and devote themselves to hus- 

 bandry. 



I am well aware that M. James Darmesteter and other repre- 

 sentatives of what might be called the meteorological school of 

 Avestan scholars deny the historical reality of a religious schism 

 of the kind here described, and would reduce Zarathustra and all 



