It is curious to observe the reluctance with which these facts are accepted, particularly by those to whom they ought to be most welcome, I mean the students of anthropology. Instead of devoting all their energy to the study of these documents, which have come upon us like a miracle, they seem only bent on inventing excuses why they need not be studied. Let it not be supposed that, because there are several translations of the Rig-Veda in English, French and German, therefore all that the Veda can teach us has been learned. Far from it. Every one of these translations has been put forward as tentative only. I myself, though during the last thirty years I have given translations of a number of the more important hymns, have only ventured to publish a specimen of what I think a translation of the Veda ought to be; and that translation, that _traduction raisonnée_ as I ventured to call it, of twelve hymns only, fills a whole volume. We are still on the mere surface of Vedic literature, and yet our critics are ready with ever so many arguments why the Veda can teach us nothing as to a primitive state of man. If they mean by primitive that which came absolutely first, then they ask for something which they will never get, not even if they discovered the private correspondence of Adam and Eve, or of the first _Homo_ and _Femina sapiens_. We mean by primitive the earliest state of man of which, from the nature of the case, we can hope to gain any knowledge; and here, next to the archives hidden away in the secret drawers of language, in the treasury of words common to all the Aryan tribes, and in the radical elements of which each word is compounded, there is no literary relic more full of lessons to the true anthropologist, to the true student of mankind, than the Rig-Veda. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 89: See Cunningham, "Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum," vol. i., 1877.] [Footnote 90: _K_ulavagga V. 33, 1. The expression used is _Kh_andaso âropemâ'ti.] [Footnote 91: See Rhys Davids, Buddhist Suttas, "Sacred Books of the East," vol. xi., p. 142.] [Footnote 92: The Brahmo-Samaj, a theistic school.--A. W.] [Footnote 93: The _Liberal_, March 12, 1882.] [Footnote 94: See R. G. Bhandarkar, Consideration of the date of the Mahâbhârata, _Journal of the R. A. S. of Bombay_, 1872; Talboys Wheeler, "History of India," ii. 365, 572; Holtzmann, "Über das alte indische Epos," 1881, p. 1; Phear, "The Aryan Village in India and Ceylon," p. 19. That the Mahâbhârata was publicly read in the seventh century A.D., we learn from Bâ_n_a; see _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_, Bombay, vol. x., p. 87, note.--A. W.] [Footnote 95: "Hibbert Lectures," p. 157.]