46 Proceediwjs of the Asiatic Society. [March, 



" Resolved that copies of this letter be sent to the Secretaries of the 

 Lahore and Nagpore Societies, also to Col. Phayre, Col. Dalton 

 Capt. Reid, Deputy Commissioner, Darjeeling, and other gentlemen 

 requesting them to aid the Society in providing Professor Agassiz 

 with the specimens of the wild and chief domesticated races of cattle." 



Babu Rajendralal Mitra drew the attention of the meeting to the 

 apparent community of origin of the words " Amen" and " Om." 



He said : " While examining some inscriptions in Tibetan characters 

 jately brought from the Buxa Dooar, my attention was directed to the 

 word Om as occurring at the end of prayers and invocations to minor 

 divinities, genii and hobgoblins. There it could not mean the triune 

 divinity, the creator, preserver and destroyer of the universe, the only 

 sense in which it is used in modern Sanskrit. I adopted, therefore, 

 its old Vedic meaning of a particle of assent or ' yes,' in which sense it 

 occurs in the Chhandogya Upanishad where it is described as an ' injunc- 

 tive term ;' the most obvious rendering of it in English, it occurred 

 to me, was the Biblical ' Amen.' Professor Wilson took the word in 

 the same sense, and after describing it in his Dictionary as a particle of 

 assent, gave, within brackets, the words verily and amen. Bohtlingk and 

 Roth in their Worterbuch offer the same conjecture, quoting the Greek 

 afxrjv. According to modern Hindu theologians and lexicographers the 

 word Om is a compound of the letters a, u and m, emblematic of the 

 threefold power of the divinity ; but in the Vedas this is nowhere 

 recognised, and the Unddi Sutras derive the word from the verbal root 

 av to 'protect,' 'support,' 'affirm,' added to the affix man, and 

 hence it means either ' the great Protector,' God, or l be it affirmed. ' 

 The v of the root is changed into u* which with the initial a and the 

 affix makes Oman, which is as near as possible to the English Amen, 

 both in sound and sense. Nor is the modern meaning of the Sanskrit 

 Om wanting in Amen ; for the Rabbis of old, according to Dr. Johnson, 

 look it to be a compound of the initials of three words sign i lying 

 i God as a faithful King.' The simplest form in which I can find the 

 word in Hebrew is ]t2# A'man,' ' he is firm,' or ' makes linn,' ' trust- 

 worthy,' 'true,' 'certain,' and in this sense, it occurs repeatedly in 

 the Old Testament as well as in tin 1 New. In the latter, it also occurs 

 in ;i slightly different sense as in a^v afxvv, A.€yw vfuv, f Verily, 

 * Avatc.shti lopas'oha, 1-110. — Aufreuht'a Unadi Sutra. 



