1867.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 43 



leave the subject, therefore, to those who advocate the loan-theory under 

 notice. I may observe, however, that even if it be possible to prove 

 its possibility, it will make but small progress in supporting the 

 conjecture that the Eastern Arians never had any cerebral letter in 

 their language. The Sanskrit has for its basis between 18 and 19 

 hundred verbal roots, which, by an ingenious series of inflections, 

 agglutinations, affixes and suffixes, produce the entire vocabulary 

 of the language. Now out of these 1800, 335 roots have the 

 contested cerebral letters ; 182 of which have the consonants exclu- 

 sive of r, 116 end in sh, and 37 in ri, or ri. If the loan-theory were 

 admitted, it will have to be proved that the Brahmins, though 

 conquerors and the more civilized of the two, had to borrow one-fifth 

 of their verbal roots from the despised aborigines, and that too at a 

 time when the Rig Veda hymns were first sung by the ancient Rishis. 

 This is a feat which, in the present state of philology, will not be 

 easy of accomplishment." 



Mr. Bay ley said, that he could not but regret that the whole of the 

 evidence on which the theory of Mr. Thomas was based, was not 

 before the Society. It was of course impossible fully to judge of the 

 merits of that theory until this was the case. Mr. Thomas's propo- 

 sitions were in fact two in number ; — 1st, that the Aryan race generally, 

 and the Indian branch of it in particular, borrowed and did not invent 

 their alphabets ; and secondly, that the particular Indian alphabet, of 

 which the earliest form was that known popularly as the " Lath" 

 character, was borrowed from the Dravidian races which were in 

 occupation of India or part of it, before the advent of the Brahmins. 

 Now he thought, that at least the grounds on which the first 

 proposition was based, were to some extent apparent. It was not, as 

 Baboo Rajendra Lai seemed to suppose, based solely on the argument 

 that the Aryan race having clearly borrowed alphabets in some cases, 

 were necessarily to be considered incapable of originating one for 

 themselves. Rajendra Lai indeed did not deny that the Aryans had 

 borrowed alphabets from the natives whose countries they overran, 

 and one undeniable instance of this action on their part, was their 

 adoption of the arrow-headed character. 



As Mr. Bayley understood Mr. Thomas's assumption, however, it 

 was at least based on better ground than Baboo Rajendra Lai imagined : 



