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

PREHISTORIC TIMES. 7. is not so comprehensive. I intend to confine myself only to the Vedic literature and show that if we read some of the pas- sages in the Vedas, which have hitherto been considered incomprehensible, in the light of the new scientific discoveries, we are forced to the conclusion that the home of the ancestors of the Vedic people was somewhere near the North Pole before the last Glacial epoch. The task is not an easy one, consider- ing the fact that the Vedic passages, on which I rely, had to be, and have been, hitherto either ignored or explained away somehow, or misinterpreted one way or another by Native and European scholars alike. But I hope to show that these inter- pretations, though they have been provisionally accepted, are not satisfactory, and that new discoveries in archæology and geology provide us with a better key for the interpretation of these passages. Thus if some of the conclusions of the my- thologist and the philologist are overthrown by these discoveries, they have rendered a still greater service by furnishing us with a better key for the interpretation of the most ancient Aryan legends, and the results obtained by using the new key cannot, in their turn, fail to throw further light on the primitive history of the Aryan race, and thus supplement or modify the conclusion now arrived at by the archæologist and the geologist. But before proceeding to discuss the Vedic texts which point out to a Polar home, it is necessary to briefly state the results of recent discoveries in archæology, geology and palæontology. My summary must necessarily be very short, for I propose to note down only such facts as will establish the proba- bility of my theory from the geological and palæontological point of view; and for this purpose I have freely drawn upon the works of such well-known writers as Lyell, Geikie, Evans, Lubbock, Croll, Taylor and others. I have also utilised the excellent popular summary of the latest results of these researches in Samuel Laing's Human Origins and other