live; when the captor has seized him, do ye set him free, Indra and Agni. If his life is failing I draw him back from the brink of destruction unharmed for a hundred autumns" (p. 62). If the sickness is a punishment from the gods, the offence must be wiped out by sacrifice, prayer, and expiations; if it is the result of a charm, it must be driven into another creature by a counter-charm. The Atharvaveda gives us the following sentence against the demon Takman, who brings fever: "May refusal meet Takman, who has glowing weapons. O Takman, go to the Mujavant or further. Attack the Çudra woman, the teeming one; shake her, O Takman. The Gandharas, the Angas, the Magadhas, we give over to Takman as servants, or a treasure."[356] The ague is banished into the frog, the jaundice into yellow birds. In the Rigveda the jaundice is put away into parrots and thrushes; consumption is to fly away with the blue jay. The custom of supporting the exorcism by laying down a leaf or a herb, which is taught in the Atharvaveda, is not unknown to the Rigveda.[357] The Atharva-veda also supplies charms against sprains, worms, and other evils.[358] The Brahmanas of the various schools of priests were not merely rules for ritual, but also exegetical and dogmatic commentaries on the separate Vedas, each destined for one of the three classes of priests who were allotted to the Rigveda, Samaveda, and Yajurveda. Of these commentaries on the Rigveda, two, differing in their arrangement, have been preserved to us; the Aitareya-Brahmana, and the Kaushitaki-Brahmana, _i.e._ the commentaries of the schools of Aitareya and Kaushitaka: for the Samaveda we have the Chandoga-Brahmana, and the Tandya-Brahmana; for the Yajurveda the Taittiriya-Brahmana and the Çatapatha-Brahmana, _i.e._ the commentaries of the schools of Tittiri and Vajasaneya. In one or two of these Brahmanas we have additions at the end of a speculative character. The compressed and difficult language of these books, the abstruse dogmatism, the abundance of examples and legends, made the Brahmanas so difficult to understand that explanations of them were soon written in a more synoptical arrangement, an easier style, and shorter form. These explanations were called sutras, _i.e._ clues. If they were intended to explain the Veda, _i.e._ revelation, they were known as Çrauta-sutras; if they collected in a synoptical form the rules for the ritual given in the Brahmanas, they were known as Kalpa-sutras. The oldest sutras of this kind, which have come down to us, are supposed to have been written about the year 400 B.C.[359] From the duty of properly intoning and pronouncing the prescribed words of the Veda, marking the metre, correctly understanding the ancient Vedic language which had subsequently taken the form of Sanskrit, and gone through other changes in the mouth of the people, and fixing the correct time for the sacrifice, there grew up among the schools of the Brahmans the beginnings of metrical, grammatical,