Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 46.djvu/25

 10. I invoke hither the foremost, all-shaped Tvashtri to come hither; may he be ours alone.

11. O tree 1, let the sacrificial food go, O god, to the gods. May the giver's splendour be foremost.

12. Offer ye the sacrifice with the word Svâhâ to Indra in the sacrificer's house. Thereto I invoke the gods. NOTES.

The hymn is ascribed, as the whole collection to which it belongs, to Medhâtithi Kânva (see the note on the preceding hymn). Its metre is Gâyatrî. Verses 1–4 = SV. II, 697–700. Verse 9 = RV. V, 5, 8. Verse 10 = TS. III, 1, 11, 1; TB. III, 5, 12, 1; MS. IV, 13, 10.

The hymn belongs to the class of Âprî hymns, which were classed by the ancient arrangers of the Samhitâ among the Agni hymns. The Âprî hymns, consisting of eleven or twelve verses, were destined for the Prayâga offerings of the animal sacrifice (comp. H. O., Zeitschrift der D. Morg. Gesellschaft, XLII, 243 seq.). They were addressed, verse by verse in regular order, partly to Agni, partly to different spirits or deified objects connected with the sacrifice, such as the sacrificial grass, the divine gates through which the gods had to pass on their way to the sacrifice, &c. The second verse was addressed by some of the Rishi families to Tanûnapât by some to Narâsamsa; in some of the hymns we find two verses instead of one (so that the total number of verses becomes twelve instead of eleven) addressed the one to Tanûnapât, the other to Narâsamsa. Bergaigne (Recherches sur l’histoire de la Liturgie Védique, p. 14) conjectures that some of the Rishi families had only seven Prayâgas. This opinion is based on the identical appearance of four verses (8–11) in the Âprî hymns of the Visvâmitras (III, 4) and of the Vasishthas (VII, 2), and on the diversity of metres used in two other Âprî hymns, IX, 5 and II, 3. To me this conjecture, though very ingenious, does not seem convincing.