and talk no longer of the mysterious or esoteric wisdom of the East. Like most students, the Emperor wished to know the exact date of the Veda, and I did not find it easy to explain to him that where we have no contemporaneous history we cannot expect an exact chronology. If some scholars placed the Veda 5000 or 10,000 B.C., we should find it difficult to refute them, but we should gain nothing, it would be like one of the distant dates in Egyptian and Babylonian chronology, a mere point _in vacuo_. He was surprised when I confessed to him that even the low date of about 1200 B.C., which I had fixed upon, seemed to me too high rather than too low, and that I should feel it a relief if anybody could establish a lower date for at least some of the Vedic hymns. I think the Emperor saw that in spite of this inevitable uncertainty, the “Rig Veda” would always maintain its unique position in the history of religion, nay, of literature, being without an equal anywhere, and allowing us an insight into the growth of thought, such as we find in no other literature. Whatever the antecedents of the Vedic religion may have been, however rudely its original features may have been effaced even before the beginning of the Brâhmana period, we can still see here and there in the Veda some germ ideas, some thoughts requiring no antecedents, and in that sense primitive, more primitive even than the thoughts of Egypt, Babylon, and Nineveh, whatever their merely chronological antiquity may have been. I do not know how it happened—that from discussing the ancient names of metals and the relative value of gold and silver, as fixed, we do not know how, in Egypt, Babylon, and afterwards in Greece, in Italy, and the rest of the civilised world at about 1 to 15—our conversation drifted away into financial questions. Here I must have been betrayed into uttering some financial heresy, possibly savouring of bimetallism, for I well remember the Emperor becoming rather impatient and saying: “I know all about that, and have studied the question for many years. Let us return to the Veda.”