In all such evolutionary researches language has always been the most useful instrument, and the study of the science of language may truly be said to have been the first science which was treated according to evolutionary or historical principles. Here, too, no doubt, intermediate links which must have existed, are sometimes lost beyond recovery, and when we arrive at the very roots of language, we feel that there may have been whole aeons before that radical period. Here science must recognize her inevitable horizons, but here again no surviving literary monument could carry us so far as the Veda. Hence its supreme importance for Aryan philology—for the philology of the most important languages of historical mankind. Other languages, whether Babylonian or Accadian, whether Hottentot or Maori, may be, for all we know, much more ancient or much more primitive; but, as scientific explorers, we can only speak of what we know, and we must renounce all conjectures that go beyond facts. In all these researches no one took a livelier interest and encouraged me more than Bunsen. When some of my translations of the Vedic hymns seemed fairly satisfactory, I used to take them to him, and he was always delighted at seeing a little more of that ancient Aryan torso, though at the time he was more specially interested in Egyptian chronology and archaeology. Often when I was alone with him did we discuss the chronological and psychological dates of Egyptian and Aryan antiquity. Kind-hearted as he was, Bunsen could get very excited, nay, quite violent in arguing, and though these fits soon passed off, yet it made discussions between His Excellency the Prussian Minister and a young German scholar somewhat difficult. At that time much less was known of the earliest Egyptian chronology than is now. But I was never much impressed by mere dates. If a king was supposed to have lived 5,000 years before our era, “What is that to us?” I used to say, “He sits on his throne _in vacuo_, and there is nothing to fix him by, nothing contemporary which alone gives interest to history. In India we have no dates; but whatever dates and names of kings and accounts of battles the Egyptian inscriptions may give us, as a book there is nothing so old in Egypt as the Veda in India. Besides, we have in the Veda thoughts; and in the chronology of thought the Veda seems to me older than even the Book of the Dead.”