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

186 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. appear rather inconsistent at the first sight; but the history of words in any language will show that old expressions are preserved in the language long after they have ceased to denote the ideas primarily expressed by them. Thus we now use coins for exchange, yet the word ‘pecuniary,’ which is derived from pecus = cattle, is still retained in the language; and similarly, we still speak of the rising of the sun, though we now know that it is not the lumi- nary that rises, but the earth, by rotating round its axis, makes the sun visible to us. Very much in the same way and by the same process, expressions like saptâshva (seven- horsed) or sapta-chakra (seven-wheeled), as applied to the year or the sun, must have become recognised and esta- blished as current phrases in the language before the hymns assumed their present form, and the Vedic bards could not have discarded them even when they knew that they were not applicable to the state of things before them. On the contrary, as we find in the Brâhmaņas, every artifice, that ingenuity could suggest, was tried to make these old phrases harmonise with the state of things then in vogue, and from the religious or the sacrificial point of view it was quite necessary to do so. But when we have to examine the question from a historical stand-point, it is our duty to separate the relics of the older period from facts or in- cidents of the later period with which the former are some- times inevitably mixed up; and if we analyse the verse in question (I, 164, 12) in this way we shall clearly see in it the traces of a year of ten months and five seasons. The same principle is also applicable in other cases, as, for in- stance, when we find the Navagvas mentioned together with the seven vipras in VI, 22, 2. The bards, who gave us the present version of the hymns, knew of the older or primeval state of things only by traditions, and it is no wonder if these traditions are occasionally mixed up with later events.