The Vedic fathers of geology

380 Tue Vepic Faruers or Grotocy.

very nature of things that they. should have been inclined to admit that the Vedic antiquity must have been preceded by the hoary past. For, the facts are self-evident, and they themselves prove the conclusion. It was for this reason, that Professor Bloomfield, while reviewing Mr. Tilak’s Orion or the Researches into the Antiquity of the Vedas, had, in his address on the occasion of the Eighteenth Anniversary of John Hopkin’s University, very rightly observed that, “The language and iterature of the Vedas is, by no means, so primitive as to place with it the real beginnings of Aryan life.” Inasmuch as, he says that, ~ these, in all probability, and in all due moder ation, reach back several thousands of years more,” and naturally, therefore, he argues that, it was “‘needless to point out, that this curtain, which seems to shut off our vision at 4500 B. C., may prove in the end a veil of thin gauze.”

And this gives rise to a series of questions, which, therefore, cannot be left unnoticed :—

(1) How oldare the Vedas, and to what Geological Epoch does their antiquity extend ?

(2) Were our (Indo-Aryan ) ancestors of the Rio-Veda times older than the Quaternary Period ?