धर्मशास्त्र. Entirely by memory. This may sound starting, but what will sound still more start- ting, and yet is a fact that can easily be ascer- tained by any body who doubts it at the present moment, if every Ms. of the Rig-veda were lost, we should be able to recover the whole of it- from the memory of the Shrotriyas in India. These native students learn the Veda by heart, and they learn it from the mouth of their Guru, never from a Ms., still less from my printed edition, and after a time they teach it again to their pupils. "" २०वा ] (( "I have had such students in my room at Oxford, who not only could repeat these hymns, but who repeated them with the pro- per accents (for the Vedic Sanskrit has ac- cents like Greek ), nay who when looking through my printed edition of the Rig-veda, could point out a misprint without the slightest hesitation. " "I can tell you more. There are hardly any various readings in our Mss. of the Rig-veda, but various schools in India have their own readings of certain passages, and they hand down those readings with great care. So, in- stead of collating Mss. as we do in Greek and Latin, I have asked some friends of mine to
