38 
Asiatic Soc., 1866). Writing with more warmth than he usually 
displayed in his writings, he therein proved conclusively that it is 
a mistake to speak of an unbroken chain of Hindu tradition, the 
meaning of the Yeda having already become largely obscure by the 
time a school' of exegesis arose ; and that, therefore, the scholars 
alluded to (viz., Roth and his school) were quite justified in emails 
cipating themselves from the trammels of native tradition, and 
calling into requisition all the other available resources of philo- 
logy, thereby laying the foundation of a true interpretation of the 
Yeda. 
After the completion of the second edition of the Original San- 
skrit Texts , Dr. Muir was by no means satisfied to rest on his 
laurels. He continued his studies as assiduously as ever, though 
perhaps with a less definite object in view; printing from time to 
time, for private distribution, small collections of metrical transla- 
tions of characteristic passages he met with in his reading, generally 
of a moral or religious tendency. These were ultimately published, in 
a collected form, in a volume of Trubner’s Oriental series, with parallel 
passages from the Bible and classical authors. In his interesting in- 
troduction, he discusses the difficult question as to whether an ac- 
quaintance with the Christian Scriptures may have exercised some 
influence on the religious ideas of the Hindus in the earlier cen- 
turies of our era ; an influence which has been asserted to be 
traceable more especially in the Bhagavad-glta, the famous philoso- 
phical episode of the Mahabharata. Although Muir does not arrive 
at any definite conclusion on this point, he seems, on the whole, to 
incline to the assumption of an independent origin of the work in 
question. The particular object he had in view in making this 
collection may best be stated in his own words : — “ But however the 
question of the obligations of the Bhagavad-glta, or of some other 
parts of the Mahabharata, to Christianity may be decided, the 
decision can scarcely affect the determination of the farther and very 
different question of the originality or otherwise, as far as any 
foreign influences are concerned, of the great bulk of the moral and 
religious sentiments embraced in my collection. These sentiments 
and observations are the natural expression of the feelings and 
experiences of universal humanity ; and the higher and nobler por- 
tion of them cannot be regarded as peculiar to Christianity. The 
