वेदों की प्राचीनता एवं काल-निर्णय / ओरायन (लोकमान्य बाल गंगाधर तिलक - खगोलीय वैदिक शोध)

iv PREFACE. was, of course, not to be expected that a scholar, who had worked all his life on a different line, would accept the new view at once, and that too on reading a bare outline of the evi- dence in its support. Still it was encouraging to hear from him that though the interpretations of Vedic passages proposed by me were probable, yet my theory appeared to be in conflict with the established geological facts. I wrote in reply that I had already examined the question from that stand-point, and ex- pected soon to place before him the whole evidence in support of my view. But, unfortunately, I have been deprived of this pleasure by his deeply mourned death which occurred soon after. The first manuscript of the book was written at the end of 1898, and since then I have had the advantage of discussing the question with many scholars in Madras, Calcutta, Lahore, Benares and other places during my travels in the different parts of India. But I hesitated to publish the book for a long time,— a part of the delay is due to other causes,—because the lines of investigation had ramified into many allied sciences such as geology, archæology, comparative mythology and so on; and, as I was a mere layman in these, I felt some diffidence as to whether I had correctly grasped the bearing of the latest researches in these sciences. The difficulty is well described by Prof. Max Muller in his review of the Pre- historic Antiquities of Indo-Europeans, published in the volume of his Last Essays. “The ever-increasing division and sub-division,” “observes the learned Professor, “of almost every branch of human knowledge into more special branches of study make the specialist, whether he likes it or not, more and more dependent on the judg- ment and the help of his fellow-workers. A geologist in our day has often to deal with questions that concern the mineralogist, the chemist, the archæologist, the philologist, nay, the the astro- nomer, rather than the geologist pur et simple, and, as