Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/19

 the imitative work of a yet more modern time), is scattered through the texts to be later described, the and the .  To assemble and sift and compare it is now one of the pressing needs of Vedic study.

The fundamental divisions of the Vedic literature here mentioned have all had their various schools of sectaries, each of these with a text of its own, showing some differences from those of the other schools: but those mentioned above are all that are now known to be in existence; and the chance of the discovery of others grows every year smaller.

The labor of the schools in the conservation of their sacred texts was extraordinary, and has been crowned with such success that the text of each school, whatever may be its differences from those of other schools, is virtually without various readings, preserved with all its peculiarities of dialect, and its smallest and most exceptional traits of phonetic form, pure and unobscured. It is not the place here to describe the means by which, in addition to the religious care of the sectaries, this accuracy was secured: forms of text, lists of peculiarities and treatises upon them, and so on. When this kind of care began in the case of each text, and what of original character may have been effaced before it, or lost in spite of it, cannot be told. But it is certain that the Vedic records furnish, on the whole, a wonderfully accurate and trustworthy picture of a form of ancient Indian language (as well as ancient Indian beliefs and institutions) which was a natural and undistorted one, and which goes back a good way behind the classical Sanskrit. Its differences from the latter the following treatise endeavors to show in detail.

Along with the verses and sacrificial formulas and phrases in the text of the Black Yajur-Veda are given long prose sections, in which the ceremonies are described, their meaning and the reason of the details and the accompanying utterances are discussed and explained, illustrative legends are reported or fabricated, and various speculations, etymological and other, are indulged in. Such matter comes