Page:Lanman's Sanskrit Reader.pdf/2



results of comparative philology are now so generally incorporated into our modern classical grammars, lexicons, and text-books, that even a slight knowledge of Sanskrit, if it be accurate so far as it goes, is of great service to the classical teacher in making his instruction interesting and effective. As independent disciplines, moreover, Sanskrit and comparative philology, and the literature and religions of India, are constantly gaining in importance, so that, for example, Sanskrit is now taught at all but one of the twenty universities of the German Empire.

The design of this work, then, is twofold. In the first place, it is to serve as an introduction to these subjects for the students of our colleges and university. The excellent Chrestomathy of has no vocabulary; and few persons can be expected to buy the costly dictionary of  or that of, at the outset, when they are uncertain, whether Sanskrit will be of sufficient interest or use to them to warrant their continuing its study. What the beginner needs is an elementary work comprehending both text and vocabulary in a single volume. And accordingly, this Reader is meant to furnish ample material for about fifty weeks' reading, in a course of three hours a week, and with the text, the appropriate lexical apparatus. The Reader is made a companion-volume to 's Sanskrit Grammar, that these two books supply all that is needed for the first year's study.

This Reader, is designed, in the second place, to render a knowledge of Sanskrit accessible to the classical teachers of high-schools, academics, and colleges. These teachers, if they pursue this study at all, usually do so without the aid of an instructor. And it is especially the requirements of unaided private study that I have taken constant pains to meet. I state this fact thus explicitly, because, both here at Cambridge, and during my connection with the Johns Hopkins University (where the plan for this work was formed), numerous inquiries for such a book have been addressed to me by persons very remote from any of the higher institutions of learning.

If, incidentally, this work should help to correct some of the false notions which are prevalent respecting the relations of Sanskrit to other languages of the Indo-European family, and to save the literature from