facts have been tampered with, old texts purloined from libraries, and philological discoveries vehemently denied.  And we have also heard from our retreats, how Dugald Stewart and his colleagues, upon seeing that the discovery would also involve ethnological affinities, and damage the prestige of those sires of the world races—­Shem, Ham and Japhet—­denied in the face of fact that “Sanskrit had ever been a living, spoken language,” supporting the theory that “it was an invention of the Brahmins, who had constructed their Sanskrit on the model of the Greek and Latin.”  And again we know, holding the proof of the same, how the majority of Orientalists are prone to go out of their way to prevent any Indian antiquity (whether MSS. or inscribed monument, whether art or science) from being declared pre-Christian.  As the origin and history of the Gentile world is made to move in the narrow circuit of a few centuries “B.C.,” within that fecund epoch when mother earth, recuperated from her arduous labours of the Stone age, begat, it seems without transition, so many highly civilized nations and false pretenses, so the enchanted circle of Indian archeology lies between the (to them unknown) year of the Samvat era, and the tenth century of the Western chronology.

Having to dispose of an “historical difficulty” of such a serious character, the defendants charged with it can but repeat what they have already stated; all depends upon the past history and antiquity allowed to the Indo-Aryan nation.  The first step to take is to ascertain how much History herself knows of that almost prehistoric period when the soil of Europe had not been trodden yet by the primitive Aryan tribes.  From the latest Encyclopedia down to Professor Max Muller and other Orientalists, we gather what follows; they acknowledge that at some immensely remote period, before the Aryan nations got divided from the parent stock (with the germs of Indo-Germanic languages in them); and before they rushed asunder to scatter over Europe and Asia in search of new homes, there stood a “single barbaric (?) people as physical and political representative of the nascent Aryan race.”  This people spoke “a now extinct Aryan language,” from which by a series of modifications (surely requiring more thousands of years than our difficulty-makers are willing to concede) there arose gradually all the subsequent languages now spoken by the Caucasian races.

That is about all Western history knows of its genesis.  Like Ravana’s brother, Kumbhakarna,—­the Hindu Rip van Winkle—­it slept for a long series of ages a dreamless, heavy sleep.  And when at last it awoke to consciousness, it was but to find the “nascent Aryan race” grown into scores of nations, peoples and races, most of them effete and crippled with age, many irretrievably extinct, while the true origin of the younger ones it was utterly unable to account for.  So much for the “youngest brother.”  As for “the eldest brother, the Hindu,” who,