Page:Sanskrit Grammar by Whitney p1.djvu/20

 to be called (apparently relating to the brahman or worship). In the White Yajur-Veda, it is separated into a work by itself, beside the or text of verse and formulas, and is called the  Brāhmana of a hundred ways. Other similar collections are found, belonging to various other schools of Vedic study, and they bear the common name of, with the name of the school, or some other distinctive title, prefixed. Thus, the and, belonging to the schools of the Rig-Veda, the  and  and other minor works, to the Sāma-Veda; the , to the Atharva-Veda; and a  or , to the Sāma-Veda, has recently (Burnell) been discovered in India; the  is a collection of mingled  and , like the  of the same name, but supplementary and later. These works are likewise regarded as canonical by the schools, and are learned by their sectaries with the same extreme care which is devoted to the, and their condition of textual preservation is of a kindred excellence. To a certain extent, there is among them the possession of common material: a fact the bearings of which are not yet fully understood.

Notwithstanding the inanity of no small part of their contents, the Brāhmaṇas are of a high order of interest in their bearings on the history of Indian institutions; and philologically they are not less important, since they represent a form of language in most respects intermediate between the classical and that of the Vedas, and offer specimens on a large scale of a prose style, and of one which is in the main a natural and freely developed one — the oldest and most primitive Indo-European prose.

Beside the Brāhmaṇas are sometimes found later appendices, of a similar character, called (forest-sections): as the, , , and so on. And from some of these, or even from the Brāhmaṇas, are extracted the earliest (sittings, lectures on sacred subjects) — which,