The attempts that have been made to translate the Vedic hymns may be divided into four periods. The first consisted of those who followed Sâya_n_a’s great Sanskrit commentary. This was the method followed by Rosen in 1830 and 1838, and again, in 1850, by H. H. Wilson. It was soon found out, however, that highly useful, nay indispensable, as the traditional interpretation of Sâya_n_a might be, it was in many places quite impossible to follow him, because the true meaning was too clear, and that adopted by Sâya_n_a too absurd. Rosen already used very freely the privilege of the scholar to choose between what is rational and what is not. Wilson had a stronger faith in Sâya_n_a, and gave us in his translation the traditional rendering, even where his own sound sense rebelled against it. There were others again who went into the other extreme, and from sheer despair at Sâya_n_a’s commentary, translated the Veda according to what they thought it ought to mean. Langlois, a professor of eloquence at Paris, carried this principle very far indeed, yet we find that his translation is still followed by some writers on ancient religion and mythology. In the meantime a new school was slowly gaining ground who held that the only satisfactory way of translating the Veda was to construct, first of all, a complete _Index Verborum_[13], to examine every passage in which the same word occurs, and then to assign that meaning to each word which would satisfy the context wherever it occurred. I published such an _Index Verborum_ at the end of my edition of Sâya_n_a’s commentary, and it is easy to see the influence which it exercised at once on the translations of the Rig-Veda which we owe to Grassmann, to Ludwig, and to Ralph T. H. Griffith, and to others who tried their hands on single hymns or single verses. Still greater was the influence exercised by the Sanskrit Dictionary of Boehtlingk and Roth, and the Vedic Vocabulary of Grassmann, though, of course, neither the one nor the other professed to give a complete index of every word and every form in every passage in which it occurred.