Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/43

Rh General significance of Whitney's work.—Its design, says Whitney (above, p. xix, Announcement), is "to put together as much as possible of the material that is to help toward the study and final comprehension of this Veda." Thus expressly did the author disavow any claim to finality for his work. As for the translation, on the one hand, the Announcement shows that he regarded it as wholly subordinate to his commentary; and I can give no better statement of the principles which have guided him in making it, than is found in the extracts from a critical essay by Whitney which I have reprinted (above, p. xix), and from which moreover we may infer that he fully recognized the purely provisional character of his translation. I am sorry that infelicities of expression in the translation, which are part and parcel of the author's extreme literalness (see p. xciv) and do not really go below the surface of the work, are (as is said below, p. xcviii) the very things that are the most striking for the non-technical reader who examines the book casually.

As for the commentary, on the other hand, it is plain that, taking the work as a whole, he has done just what he designed to do. Never before has the material for the critical study of an extensive Vedic text been so comprehensively and systematically gathered from so multifarious sources. The commentary will long maintain for itself a place of first-rate importance as an indispensable working-tool for the purposes which it is designed to serve. I have put together (below, pages xcii–xciii) a few examples to illustrate the ways in which the commentary will prove useful. A variety of special investigations, moreover, will readily suggest themselves to competent students of the commentary; and the subsidiary results that are thus to be won (the "by-products," so to say), are likely, I am convinced, to be abundant and of large interest and value. Furthermore, we may confidently believe that Whitney's labors will incidentally put the whole discipline of Vedic criticism upon a broader and firmer basis.

Need of a systematic commentary on the Rig-Veda.—Finally, Whitney seems to me to have made it plain that a similar commentary is the indispensable preliminary for the final comprehension of the Rig-Veda. That commentary should be as much better and as much wider in its scope as it can be made by the next generation of scholars; for it will certainly not be the work of any one man alone. It is a multifarious work for which many elaborate preparations need yet to be made. Thus the parallel passages from the Rig-Veda and the other texts must be noted with completeness on the margin of the Rik Saṁhitā opposite the pādas concerned; for this task Bloomfield's Vedic Concordance is likely to be the most important single instrument. Thus, again, Brāhmaṇa, Çrāuta, Gṛhya, and other texts appurtenant to the Rig-Veda, together with Epic and later texts,