can be placed with safety after the late Brahmanic age; and, consequently, subsequent to the Upanishads, although it is probable that many Upanishads were written after the first Pur[=a]nas.  The general compass of this enormous literature is from an indefinite antiquity to about 1500 A.D.  A liberal margin of possible error must be allowed in the assumption of any specific dates.  The received opinion is that the Rig Veda goes back to about 2000 B.C., yet are some scholars inclined rather to accept 3000 B.C. as the time that represents this era.  Weber, in his Lectures on Sanskrit Literature (p. 7), rightly says that to seek for an exact date is fruitless labor; while Whitney compares Hindu dates to ninepins—­set up only to be bowled down again.  Schroeder, in his Indiens Literatur und Cultur, suggests that the prior limit may be “a few centuries earlier than 1500,” agreeing with Weber’s preferred reckoning; but Whitney, Grassmann, and Benfey provisionally assume 2000 B.C. as the starting point of Hindu literature.  The lowest possible limit for this event Mueller now places at about 1500, which is recognized as a very cautious view; most scholars thinking that Mueller’s estimate gives too little time for the development of the literary periods, which, in their opinion, require, linguistically and otherwise, a greater number of years.  Brunnhofer more recently has suggested 2800 B.C. as the terminus; while the last writers on the subject (Tilak and Jacobi) claim to have discovered that the period from 3500 to 2500 represents the Vedic age.  Their conclusions, however, are not very convincing, and have been disputed vigorously.[4] Without the hope of persuading such scholars as are wedded to a terminus of three or four thousand years ago that we are right, we add, in all deference to others, our own opinion on this vexed question.  Buddhism gives the first semblance of a date in Hindu literature.  Buddha lived in the sixth century, and died probably about 480, possibly (Westergaard’s extreme opinion) as late as 368.[5] Before this time arise the S[=u]tras, back of which lie the earliest Upanishads, the bulk of the Br[=a]hmanas, and all the Vedic poems.  Now it is probable that the Brahmanic literature itself extends to the time of Buddha and perhaps beyond it.  For the rest of pre-Buddhistic literature it seems to us incredible that it is necessary to require, either from the point of view of linguistic or of social and religious development, the enormous period of two thousand years.  There are no other grounds on which to base a reckoning except those of Jacobi and his Hindu rival, who build on Vedic data results that hardly support the superstructure they have erected.  Jacobi’s starting-point is from a mock-serious hymn, which appears to be late and does not establish, to whatever date it be assigned, the point of departure from which proceeds his whole argument, as Whitney has shown very well.  One is driven back to the needs of a literature in respect of time sufficient