going back several centuries before the beginning of our era. There are three accents in the Rigveda as well as the other sacred texts. The most important of these is the rising accent, called ud-atta ("raised"), which corresponds to the Greek acute. Comparative philology shows that in Sanskrit it rests on the same syllable as bore it in the proto-Aryan language. In Greek it is generally on the same syllable as in Sanskrit, except when interfered with by the specifically Greek law restricting the accent to one of the last three syllables. Thus the Greek heptá corresponds to the Vedic saptá, "seven." The low-pitch accent, which precedes the acute, is called the anudatta ("not raised"). The third is the falling accent, which usually follows the acute, and is called svarita ("sounded"). Of the four different systems of marking the accent in Vedic texts, that of the Rigveda is most commonly employed. Here the acute is not marked at all, while the low-pitch anudatta is indicated by a horizontal stroke below the syllable bearing it, and the svarita by a vertical stroke above. Thus yajnasyà ("of sacrifice") would mean that the second syllable has the acute and the third the svarita (yajnásyà). The reason why the acute is not marked is because it is regarded as the middle tone between the other two. [2] The hymns of the Rigveda consist of stanzas ranging in number from three to fifty-eight, but usually not exceeding ten or twelve. These stanzas (often loosely called verses) are composed in some fifteen different metres, only seven of which, however, are at all frequent. Three of them are by far the commonest, claiming together about four-fifths of the total number of stanzas in the Rigveda. There is an essential difference between Greek and Vedic prosody. Whereas the metrical unit of the former system is the foot, in the latter it is the line (or verse), feet not being distinguished. Curiously enough, however, the Vedic metrical unit is also called pada, or "foot," but for a very different reason; for the word has here really the figurative sense of "quarter" (from the foot of a quadruped), Because the most usual kind of stanza has four lines. The ordinary padas consist of eight, eleven, or twelve syllables. A stanza or rich is generally formed of three or four lines of the same kind. Four or five of the rarer types of stanza are, however, made up of a combination of different lines.