It makes no difference whether we ourselves consider this religious development of Aryan thought of the Godhead as true or mistaken. Its real interest is that it has historical reality, and that at all events we can learn lessons from it which we can learn nowhere else. It was my desire to gain a direct knowledge of what is preserved in the Rig-Veda of the earliest religious development of our race, and thus to fill a gap which had been felt for many years and deplored by all true scholars, that made me conceive the idea of publishing the text and native commentary of the Rig-Veda; a task not without its difficulties, both scientific and material, for it would otherwise have been undertaken long before. I have a letter dated August, 1845, now before me from the late Professor Roth, the editor with Professor Boehtlingk of our great Sanskrit Dictionary, where he says, “It is a truly youthful boldness to undertake an edition of the whole of Sâya_n_a’s commentary by yourself alone,” and he proposes that I should allow him, Dr. Trithen, Dr. Rieu and others to take each a part of the work. In some respects I am sorry now that I did not accept this offer, for the Veda would have appeared sooner. But there were difficulties in this combination, as in most combinations, and being then very youthful and bold, I took the whole work on my own shoulders. But if my edition of the Rig-Veda helped to usher in quite a new period in Sanskrit scholarship in Europe, it naturally produced an even greater commotion all over India. After all, it was their Bible, and had never been published before during the three or four thousand years of its existence. Attempts were made in various quarters to taboo it, as having been printed by a Mle_kkh_a and with cow’s blood; but the book proved itself too strong, it was indispensable, and was soon accepted even by those who at first had placed it under their interdict. The late Dr. Haug sent me a full account of a meeting held by the Brâhmans at Poonah, who, though unwilling at first to touch the book, called an assembly in which a man, not a Brâhman, read out my edition, and all the Brâhmans corrected whatever MSS. they possessed, according to the text as settled in the distant University of Oxford. Râjah Râdhâkânta Deva.