INTRODUCTION, I.

thing that the near relationship of the two languages should have been brought to light.

In 1798, Father Paulo de St. Barthélemy further developed Jones's remark in an essay on the antiquity of the Zend language¹ 'De antiquitate et affinitate linguae samscrdamicae et germanicae' (On the antiquity and affinity of the Sanskrit and Germanic languages), Rome, 1798.. He showed its affinity with the Sanskrit by a list of such Zend and Sanskrit words as were least likely to be borrowed—viz., those that designate the degrees of relationship, the limbs of the body, and the most general and essential ideas. Another list, intended to show, on a special topic, how closely connected the two languages are, contains eighteen words taken from the liturgic language used in India and Persia. This list was not very happily drawn up, as out of the eighteen instances there is not a single one that stands inquiry; yet it was a happy idea, and one which has not even yet yielded all that it promised. His conclusions were that in a far remote antiquity, Sanskrit was spoken in Persia and Media, that it gave birth to the Zend language, and that the Zend-Avesta is authentic: "Were it but a recent compilation," he writes, "as Jones asserts, how is it that the olden rites of the Parsis, the old inscriptions of the Persians, the accounts of the Zoroastrian religion in the classical writers, the liturgic prayers of the Parsis, and, lastly, even their books do not reveal the pure Sanskrit, as written in the land wherein the Parsis live, but a mixed language, which is as different from the other dialects of India as French is from Italian?" This amounted, in fact, to saying that the Zend is not derived from the Sanskrit, but that both are derived from another and older language. The Carmelite had a dim notion of that truth, but, as he failed to express it distinctly, it was lost for years and had to be re-discovered.

The first twenty-five years of this century were void of results, but the old and sterile discussions as to the authenticity of the texts continued in England. In 1808, John Leyden regarded Zend as a Prakrit dialect, parallel to Pali; Pali being identical with the Magadhi dialect and Zend with the...