The chief purpose of the Brahmanas is to explain the mutual relation of the sacred text and the ceremonial, as well as their symbolical meaning with reference to each other. With the exception of the occasional legends and striking thoughts which occur in them, they cannot be said to be at all attractive as literary productions. To support their explanations of the ceremonial, they interweave exegetical, linguistic, and etymological observations, and introduce myths and philosophical speculations in confirmation of their cosmogonic and theosophic theories. They form an aggregate of shallow and pedantic discussions, full of sacerdotal conceits, and fanciful, or even absurd, identifications, such as is doubtless unparalleled anywhere else. Yet, as the oldest treatises on ritual practices extant in any literature, they are of great interest to the student of the history of religions in general, besides furnishing much important material to the student of Indian antiquity in particular. It results from what has been said that the contrasts between the two older phases of Vedic literature are strongly marked. The Vedas are poetical in matter and form; the Brahmanas are prosaic and written in prose. The thought of the Vedas is on the whole natural and concrete; that of the Brahmanas artificial and abstract. The chief significance of the Vedas lies in their mythology; that of the Brahmanas in their ritual. The subject-matter of the Brahmanas which are attached to the various Vedas, differs according to the divergent duties performed by the kind of priest connected with each Veda. The Brahmanas of the Rigveda, in explaining the ritual, usually limit themselves to the duties of the priest called hotri or "reciter" on whom it was incumbent to form the canon (çastra) for each particular rite, by selecting from the hymns the verses applicable to it. The Brahmanas of the Sama-veda are concerned only with the duties of the udgatri or "chanter" of the Samans; the Brahmanas of the Yajur-veda with those of the adhvaryu, or the priest who is the actual sacrificer. Again, the Brahmanas of the Rigveda more or less follow the order of the ritual, quite irrespectively of the succession of the hymns in the Veda itself. The Brahmanas of the Sama- and the Yajur-veda, on the other hand, follow the order of their respective Vedas, which are already arranged in the ritual sequence. The Brahmana of the Sama-veda, however, rarely explains individual verses, while that of the Yajur-veda practically forms a running commentary on all the verses of the text.