OF THE HAMILTON ASS )CIATION. 95 



Father, Mothet, Brother, Sister, Sun, Moon, God, Home, Etc. On 

 more critical examination he finds that the race to which he belongs 

 and the race in whose custody that book is found are manifestly 

 cousins. Their distant forefathers, of whom the writers of that old 

 book were evidently among the last survivors, must have lived in the 

 same country, speaking the same language, the original of which has 

 been lost, but the later stages of which are accurately represented in 

 the language of that book. 



I have adduced all this for the sake of illustration. But, if you 

 will substitute for the word bible the name Rig Veda ; for Americans, 

 Hindoos ; for New Zealanders, Europeans ; and for English and 

 Great Britain, Sanskrit and the Aryan Plain, you will have an 

 exact description of what has actually occured in the history of the 

 Aryan race. 



Within the present century the bible of the Hindoos has 

 fallen into the hands of Europeans, That bible is a remarkable 

 book. The first part of it especially, called the Rig-Veda, contains 

 for us a wonderful revelation concerning our early ancestry. It was 

 composed more than three thousand years ago, and pertains to an 

 age as early as the days of Moses, if not as early as the time of 

 Abraham, and according to some authorities, earlier. When its 

 contents were first embodied in written form is not definitely known, 

 but certainly not less than three thousand years ago. It is written 

 in the Sanskrit language, a language which has been dead for over 

 two thousand years. The book has been in the hands of the Hin_ 

 doos for many centuries, but few, even of their most learned priests^ 

 have been able to read it. But its contents are now within our 

 reach. Through the labors of such scholars as Colebrook, Wilson 

 and MuUer, it has been translated into our own tongue. And in the 

 course of the study of the language in which it is found, the remark- 

 able discovery has been made that we and a large proportion of the 

 heathen Hindoos are cousins. Their forefathers and ours were one 

 and the same people. At the time when the children of Shem were 

 feeding their flocks in Canaan, or enduring bondage in Egypt, or 

 wandering in the wilderness, or contending with the tribes that dwelt 

 round about them, those peaceful sons of Japhet were dwelling se- 

 curely on a great plain considerably to the eastward of the Semitic 

 branch of the family. They called themselves Aryans, a name, the 



