We must never forget that the ancient literature of India was entirely mnemonic. This may sound almost incredible, yet there are few Sanskrit scholars who would any longer doubt it. In their recognised system of education the imprinting of the ancient books on the memory of the young was the most essential feature. Boys, not girls, had to spend years and years of their youth, while staying in the house of a Guru, in learning by heart line after line of certain books, and nothing else. Thus only can we account for the wonderful capacity and tenacity of their memory. They at first learnt their sacred books, as I have known children to learn poems in a foreign language, without even attempting to understand a single word. Children of good Brâhman families were simply treated like sheets of paper, on which the teacher impressed letters, syllables, words, and sentences by sound only. Later only came the time for going over (Adhyayana) what stood thus imprinted on their memory, and for understanding, under the guidance of qualified teachers, its real purport. This, too, may seem almost incredible to us, but in the absence of writing and printing, what else could have been done? Every boy who passed through the orthodox system of education (Brahma_k_aryâ) became a copy of whatever text he was made to learn, and this copy had to be kept in good condition by constant repetition. Unless we keep this clearly before our mind, we shall never understand the state of ancient literature in India, with all its changes and chances, before the introduction of writing. When we consider, for instance, the enormous bulk of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahâbhârata, a poem of more than 90,000 couplets, four volumes quarto, we hesitate before accepting it as a mnemonic poem. And yet we have what amounts to almost positive evidence of the poem having existed before the introduction of writing into India, in the fact that there is an episode, added at the beginning of the poem, in which we are told how the whole poem was reduced to writing by the god Ga_n_e_s_a, and that this episode is absent in many MSS., particularly those of the South of India. And even after the introduction of writing every precaution was taken to keep certain sacred texts from being written down, so as to force each rising generation to learn their literature, sacred and profane, from the mouth of a teacher, and not from a manuscript. Even to the present day this old system of imprinting whole books on the brain has not been allowed to become entirely obsolete, and the mnemonic achievements which in several cases I have witnessed myself in young men when they come to Oxford are almost unbelievable.