1867.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Sociaty. 49 



in India. If it were the fact, that the early Aryans, with their "beliefs 

 in gods descending from above, and in the firm existence of a golden 

 age and a higher state from which man descended, were met by another 

 faith already established in India, by a school holding the doctrine 

 of the progression of races from below upwards, and from which both 

 the Sivite and the Buddhist forms have sprung, then it may be that 

 the earliest Phonetic alphabet was in the possession of this latter 

 school. That the aboriginal Dravidian savages should have invented 

 either the religion or the alphabet, seemed to him to be out of the 

 question. They must have come from some foreign source. The 

 question remained, what was that source ? 



Mr. Bayley explained that he had used the terms " Scythian" 

 and " Aryan" merely as concise forms of expression, and without 

 any intention of assigning an ethnologic character to the Snakes. 



Babu Rajendralala Mitra was glad to find that Mr. Bayley concurred 

 in the main with what he had said in regard to that part of the question 

 to which he had confined his attention. He was well aware of more than 

 one alphabet having been current in different parts of India, in writing 

 down one language, in the time of Asoka and for some centuries after 

 it, but it. did not at all serve to throw any light on the question at issue, 

 viz. the source whence the Arians first got their alphabet. The researches 

 of the learned Dr. Ooldstiicker had clearly established that Panini lived 

 many centuries before the age of As'oka, and at his time the art of writ- 

 ing was well known. The root likh " to write " (aksharavinyds'e) in his 

 Dhdtupdtha was conclusive on the subject, and the question therefore 

 was, what was the alphabet that great grammarian and his predecessors 

 used ? was it the Bactrian, or the Pali, or any other which has been 

 replaced by the latter ? There were not data sufficient to give a positive 

 answer to this ; but he felt no hesitation in giving a negative one, as 

 regards the Bactrian. All northern languages, or rather those of cold 

 regions, are noted for gutturals, aspirates, troublesome combinations of 

 consonants, and distinctions of long and short vowels, which Byron 

 well describes as the 



" harsh, grunting guttural, 



Which we have to hiss, spit and sputter all." 

 These, when transferred to hot countries, soon lose their sharpness 

 and become soft and sweet. The liistory of the Sanskrit language 



