Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/146

cxxxviii Summations of hymns and verses at end of divisions.—These are made in the mss. at the end of the division summed up, and constitute as it were brief colophons; and the details concerning them are given in the notes at the points where they occur. ⌊For examples, see the ends of the several anuvākas and books: thus, pages 6, 12, 18, 22, 29, 36, and so on. The summations become somewhat more elaborate and less harmonious in the later books: see, for example, pages 516, 561, 659, 707, 737.⌋

The summations quoted from the Pañcapaṭalikā.—A peculiar matter to be noted in connection with the summations just mentioned is the constant occurrence with them, through books i.-xviii., of bits of extract from an Old Anukramaṇī, as we may call it: catch-words intimating the number of verses in the divisions summed up. ⌊For details respecting this treatise, see above, p. lxxi.⌋ These citations are found accordantly in all the mss.—by no means in all at every point; they are more or less fragmentary in different mss.; but they are wholly wanting in none of ours (except K. ⌊and perhaps L.⌋). The phrases which concern the end of a book are the ones apt to be found in the largest number of mss. In book vii. there is a double set, the extra one giving the number of hymns in the anuvāka.

⌊Indication of the extent of the divisions by reference to an assumed norm.—In giving the summations of verses, it is by no means always the case that the Pañcapaṭalikā expresses itself in a direct and simple way. Sometimes indeed it does so where its prevailing method would lead us to expect it to do otherwise: thus in book vi., where the normal number of verses to the anuvāka is 30, it says simply and expressly that anuvākas 3 and 4 have 33 verses each (trayastriṅçakāu: p. 311) and that 5 and 6 have 30 each (triṅçakāu: p. 1045). Very often, however, the extent of a division is intimated by stating its overplus or shortage with reference to an assumed norm. One hardly knows how much critical value to assign to the norms (the last anuvāka of book vi., with 64 verses, exceeds the norm of 30 by more than the norm itself); but the method is a deviation from straightforwardness of expression, and that deviation is increased, as is so often the case, by the gratuitous exigencies of the metrical form into which the Pañcapaṭalikā is cast. Thus for book v. it says (pages 230, 236), 'the first [anuvāka] falls short of sixty by twice six and the next after the first by eleven.' So forty-two is in one place (p. 61) 'half-a-hundred less eight,' and in another (p. 439) it is 'twice twenty-one.' For anuvāka 3 of book vii. the total is 31 (norm 20); but here (p. 413) not even the overplus is stated simply as 'eleven,' but rather as 'eight and three.' This method of reference to a norm is used even where the departure from it is very large, as in the case of anuvāka 3 of book iv., which is described (p. 176) as having 21 verses over the norm of 30.⌋