It is nearly twenty years ago that my attention was first drawn to the Veda, while attending, in the years 1846 and 1847, the lectures of Eugène Burnouf at the Collège de France. I was then looking out, like most young men at that time of life, for some great work, and without weighing long the difficulties which had hitherto prevented the publication of the Veda, I determined to devote all my time to the collection of the materials necessary for such an undertaking. I had read the principal works of the later Sanskrit literature, but had found little there that seemed to be more than curious. But to publish the Veda, a work that had never before been published in India or in Europe, that occupied in the history of Sanskrit literature the same position which the Old Testament occupies in the history of the Jews, the New Testament in the history of modern Europe, the Koran in the history of Mohammedanism,--a work which fills a gap in the history of the human mind, and promises to bring us nearer than any other work to the first beginnings of Aryan language and Aryan thought,--this seemed to me an undertaking not altogether unworthy a man's life. What added to the charm of it was that it had once before been undertaken by Frederick Rosen, a young German scholar, who died in England before he had finished the first book, and that after his death no one seemed willing to carry on his work. What I had to do, first of all, was to copy not only the text, but the commentary of the Rig-veda, a work which when finished will fill six of these large volumes. The author or rather the compiler of this commentary, Sâya_n_a Â_k_ârya, lived about 1400 after Christ, that is to say, about as many centuries after, as the poets of the Veda lived before, the beginning of our era. Yet through the 3000 years which separate the original poetry of the Veda from the latest commentary, there runs an almost continuous stream of tradition, and it is from it, rather than from his own brain, that Sâya_n_a draws his explanations of the sacred texts. Numerous MSS., more or less complete, more or less inaccurate, of Sâya_n_a's classical work, existed in the then Royal Library at Paris, in the Library of the East-India House, then in Leadenhall Street, and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. But to copy and collate these MSS. was by no means all. A number of other works were constantly quoted in Sâya_n_a's commentary, and these quotations had all to be verified. It was necessary first to copy these works, and to make indexes to all of them, in order to be able to find any passage that might be referred to in the larger commentary. Many of these works have since been published in Germany and France, but they were not to be procured twenty years ago. The work, of course, proceeded but slowly, and many times I doubted whether I should be able to carry it through. Lastly came the difficulty,--and by no means the smallest,--who was to