I say, our modern MSS., for all our MSS. are modern, and very modern. Few Sanskrit MSS. are more than four or five hundred years old, the fact being that in the damp climate of India no paper will last for more than a few centuries. How then, you will naturally ask, can it be proved that the original hymns were composed between 1200 and 1500 before the Christian era, if our MSS. only carry us back to about the same date after the Christian era? It is not very easy to bridge over this gulf of nearly three thousand years, but all I can say is that, after carefully examining every possible objection that can be made against the date of the Vedic hymns, their claim to that high antiquity which is ascribed to them, has not, as far as I can judge, been shaken. I shall try to explain on what kind of evidence these claims rest. You know that we possess no MS. of the Old Testament in Hebrew older than about the tenth century after the Christian era; yet the Septuagint translation by itself would be sufficient to prove that the Old Testament, such as we now read it, existed in MS. previous, at least, to the third century before our era. By a similar train of argument, the works to which I referred before, in which we find every hymn, every verse, every word and syllable of the Veda accurately counted by native scholars about five or six hundred years before Christ, guarantee the existence of the Veda, such as we now read it, as far back at least as five or six hundred years before Christ. Now in the works of that period, the Veda is already considered, not only as an ancient, but as a sacred book; and, more than this, its language had ceased to be generally intelligible. The language of India had changed since the Veda was composed, and learned commentaries were necessary in order to explain to the people, then living, the true purport, nay, the proper pronunciation, of their sacred hymns. But more than this. In certain exegetical compositions, which are generally comprised under the name of Sûtras, and which are contemporary with, or even anterior to, the treatises on the theological statistics just mentioned, not only are the ancient hymns represented as invested with sacred authority, but that other class of writings, the Brâhma_n_as, standing half-way between the hymns and the Sûtras, have likewise been raised to the dignity of a revealed literature. These Brâhma_n_as, you will remember, are prose treatises, written in illustration of the ancient sacrifices and of the hymns employed at them. Such treatises would only spring up when some kind of explanation began to be wanted both for the ceremonial and for the hymns to be recited at certain sacrifices, and we find, in consequence, that in many cases the authors of the Brâhma_n_as had already lost the power of understanding the text of the ancient hymns in its natural and grammatical meaning, and that they suggested the most absurd explanations of the various sacrificial acts, most of