As the Pārsīs are the ruins of a people, so also their sacred books represent the ruins of a religion. There has been no other great belief in the world that left such poor monuments of its fallen splendor. Yet great is the value of the Avesta, and the belief of the few surviving Pārsīs, in the eyes of the historian, as they present to us the last reflex of the ideas which prevailed in Īrān during the five centuries which preceded and the seven which followed the birth of Christ. By the help of the Pārsī religion and the Avesta, we are enabled to go back to that momentous period in the history of literature which saw the blending of the Āryan mind with the Semitic, and thus opened the second stage of Āryan thought.[154] MANUSCRIPTS. The recovery of the manuscripts of the Zend-Avesta, and the translation of them proved to be a herculean task for Orientalists, and more than one valuable life has been given largely to this work. For an hundred years this great problem has cost tireless effort, for its solution demanded as much pioneer work as the deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions of the ancient kings. We are largely indebted to Anquetil Duperron, the young Frenchman who was so fearless in his enthusiasm that he enlisted[155] as a private soldier in order to secure a passage to India, and spent six years in that country collecting the manuscripts of the Avesta, and in trying to obtain from the Dastūrs a knowledge of their contents. But his was pioneer work, and his translation of the Avesta, which was made with the assistance of Dastūr Dārāb, was by no means trustworthy; it was in fact a French translation of a Persian rendering which had itself been made from a Pahlavī version of the Zend original.[156] Afterward Dr. Rask went to Bombay in the interests of the Danish government and after collecting many valuable manuscripts, wrote his essay “On the Age and Genuineness of the Zend Language.” About the middle of the present century, Westergaard, who is also a Dane, and one of the most accomplished Zend scholars of Europe, published an edition of the sacred books of the Zoroastrians. Burnouf, Spiegel and Bopp were also enthusiastic students of these books of the Magian literature, and after a time Dr. Haug, a young and enthusiastic German, was appointed to a professorship of Sanskṛit in the Poona College; while here he availed himself of his opportunity to make a thorough study of the literature of the Pārsīs. He contributed a valuable collection of “Essays” on the subject.