Lassen was Schlegel's pupil, and together they studied the literature and antiquities of India, examining, translating, and publishing the original texts; whilst at the same time Franz Bopp devoted himself to the study of the language, making his grammars accessible to all, and coming to the conclusion which was then startling, although it is now generally accepted, of the common origin of the Indo-European languages. It was proved that the Vedas, that collection of sacred writings held in too universal veneration to be tampered with, were written in a very ancient and very pure idiom which had not been revived, and whose close resemblance with the Zend, put back the date of the composition of the books beyond the time of the separation of the Aryan family into two branches. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana, dating from the Brahminical or the period succeeding that of the Vedas, were next studied, together with the Puranas. Owing to a profounder knowledge of the language and a more intimate acquaintance with the mythology of the Hindus, scholars were able to fix approximately the date of the composition of these poems, to ascertain the numberless interpolations, and to extract everything of actual historical or geographical value from those marvellous allegories. The result of these patient and minute investigations was a conviction that the Celtic, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slave, and Persian languages had one common parent, and that parent none other than Sanskrit. If, then, their language was the same, it followed as a matter of course that the people had been also identical. The differences now existing between these various idioms are accounted for by the successive breakings up of the primitive people, approximate dates enable us to realize the greater or less affinity of those languages with the Sanskrit, and the nature of the words which they have borrowed from it, words corresponding by their nature to the different degrees of advance in civilization. Moreover a very clear and definite notion was obtained of the kind of life led by the founders of the Indo-European race, and the changes brought about in it by the progress of civilization. The Vedas give us a picture of the Aryan race before it migrated to India, and occupied the Punjab and Cabulistan. By the aid of these poems we can look on at struggles against the primitive races of Hindustan; whose resistance was all the more desperate in that the conqueror, of their caste divisions, left them only the lowest and most degraded. Thanks to the Vedas we can realize every detail of the pastoral and patriarchal life of the Aryans, a life so domestic and unruffled, that we mentally ask ourselves whether the eager strife of the modern peoples is not a poor exchange for the peaceful existence which their few wants secured to their forefathers.