=Characteristics.=—Oldest of all the Indo-European tongues, and most closely resembling the common parent that is lost, is SANSCRIT—the language spoken by those fair-skinned Aryans who more than thirty centuries ago, swarming through the Hindoo Koosh passes, made the sunny plains of Hindostan their own (page 16). Sanscrit spread over most of the peninsula; and the meaning of the word, _perfected_, is significant of the flexibility, refinement, regularity, and philosophical system of grammar, by which the language was distinguished. In luxuriance of inflection it was unequalled. Its nouns were varied according to eight cases, and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural); and its verbs, which assumed causal, desiderative, and frequentative forms, were carried in conjugation through three voices, the active, middle, and passive. Its chief fault—a result of its very richness—lay in the frequent use of long compounds, particularly adjectives, presenting what seems to us a confused combination of ideas, sometimes ludicrously lengthened out; as in the expressions, “always-to-be-remembered-with-reverence patriot,” “water-play-delighted maidenn-bathing-fragrant river-breezes” (that is, _river-breezes made fragrant by the bathing of maidens delighted with sporting in the water_). (_Consult Dr. Perry’s “Sanscrit Primer.”_) Neither the parallelism of Hebrew poetry (page 89) nor the rhyme of modern times finds a place in Sanscrit verse; it is distinguished from prose, like Greek poetry, simply by a metrical arrangement of long and short syllables. The measured cadence gave great delight to the cultivated ear of the Hindoos. “There are two excellent things in the world,” says one of their writers—“the friendship of the good, and the beauties of poetry.” Sanscrit is now a dead language. About three hundred years before the Christian era, dialects similarly derived took its place among the people, and it has since been kept alive only in the conversation and writings of the learned, as the sacred language of the Brahmans, or priestly caste.[4] Yet so extensive is its literature that it costs a Brahman half his life to master a portion of its sacred books alone. [Illustration: BRAHMAN PRIEST.] =Sanscrit Alphabet.=—As to the origin of the Sanscrit alphabet, consisting of fifty letters, history is silent. It is believed that the entire early literature was preserved for centuries by oral repetition. When their polished tongue was first expressed in written characters—derived from the Phœnicians or independently invented—so perfectly did these answer the purpose that the Hindoos styled their alphabet “the writing of the gods.” The Sanscrit letters are still preserved in the written language of the pure Hindoos, but in that of the Mohammedan population have been replaced with the Arabic characters.