Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/18

 of this period are as yet too unclear to allow of our speaking with entire confidence as to anything concerning them. Thus, the Veda of chants, containing only about a sixth as much, its verses nearly all found in the Rig-Veda also, but appearing here with numerous differences of reading: these were passages put together for chanting at the soma-sacrifices. Again, collections called by the comprehensive name of Veda of sacrificial formulas : these contained not verses alone, but also numerous prose utterances, mingled with the former, in the order in which they are practically employed in the ceremonies; they were strictly liturgical collections. Of these, there are in existence several texts, which have their mutual differences: the (in two slightly discordant versions,  and ), sometimes also called the White Yajur-Veda; and the various and considerably differing texts of the Black Yajur-Veda, namely the, the , the , and the  (the two last not yet published). Finally, another historical collection, like the Rig-Veda, but made up mainly of later and less accepted material, and called (among other less current names) the Veda of the Atharvans (a legendary priestly family); it is somewhat more than half as bulky as the Rig-Veda, and contains a certain amount of material corresponding to that of the latter, and also a number of brief prose passages. To this last collection is very generally refused in the orthodox literature the name of Veda; but for us it is the most interesting of all, after the Rig-Veda, because it contains the largest amount of hymn-material (or, as it is called, in distinction from the prose ), and in a language which, though distinctly less antique than that of the other, is nevertheless truly Vedic. Two versions of it are extant, one of them in only a single known manuscript.

A not insignificant body of like material, and of various period (although doubtless in the main belonging to the latest time of the Vedic productiveness, and in part perhaps