Morning journal and courier., 1883-03-14
The Veda.
Lecture in the Mechanics' Course Last
 Evening by Prof Whitney.

Lecture in the Mechanics' Course Last
 Evening by Prof Whitney.
 Prof. Whitney's,of of Yale, lecture in the Me canics' course at North Sheffield hall last evening was on ''The Veda" and highly in- terested a large audience. glance at the lecture is as follows The name Veda is the title of work belonging to far of India, and is the Bible of the inhabitants of India, the ancient sacred book of one great division of the human race.
 The Koran of the Arabs, the Avesta of the Persian fire worshippers, the writings of .Confucius are all of high interest, important
 for the inner history of their several peoples,
 but they all lack that breadth and depth of
 conseuuence that belongs to the Hindu Veda.
 Veda literally means knowledge and the simi-
 larity of it's root ''vid" to the root of the
 Latin video, the Greek o'1da and the English
 wit, wict, witness, is an intimation of the re-
 lation of the Veda to us in virtue of the com-
 mon source of their languages in the original Indo- European or Aryan family.
 The opening of India by the English tra-
 ders, greedy for gold, gave us the ancient
 Sanskrit language and literature. Every where through it the Veda is acknowledged as the beginning, referred to as sacred rev. eiation on whose authority everything else reposes. The sacred literature of Christianity does not point any more clearly to the Bible as it's foundation than the sacred literature of India to the Veda.
 In spite of great obstacles Colebrooke in 1895 and Rosen, Roth, Bensey, Weber, Mul Ter, generation later, inaugurated a new era in the study of India's antiquity. The whole body of these writings is di- vided into four parts, each called Veda. At the head of each stands 8 collection of sacred utterances chiefly poetic. The Vedic n like our hymn books. There are more than
 thousand of these songs, containing over ten thousand two line stanzas. These sacred songs are the product of the joint devotional and poetic feeling of certain early period ! in the history of India.
 This great mass of literature has been handed down to our time mainly by living tradition, from the mouth of the teacher to the ear of the scholar.
 The Vedie Hindu presents marked con trast to the Hindu of the later period we arin an air of freshness and primitiveness as com pared with the latter. The Vedas contained then the lyric records of congeries of free tribes, fighting, winning property, enjoying life, and calling on their gods to help them in it.
 That India as seen in the Veda should have developed into the India of ordinary history involves strange problems The period of time represented by the Ve die hymns may have been one thousand or even two thousand years before the Chris tian era. It is interesting to note that the ancestors of all those races of Europe and Asia which were Hindo- European once held the same myths and worshipped the same gods by the same rites.
 The conversion of Vedic Hinduism to the
 later Brahminism wiped out or buried be- yond recovery all that was primitive in In dian beliefs. AS the study of Sanskript in augurated the science of comparative philol. ogy, so the study of Vedism inaugurated the comparative science of the worlds religions We are not called upon to admire the Veda for it's contribution to the stores of human | thought, but it is rather material for us to think upon. The Veda is book for schol l ars to dig in. In conclusion, Prof. Whitney read version of two or three of its hymns ''To Agni," ''To India," ''To the Dawn, D &c