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

428 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS. by snow and ice of the Glacial epoch, and other cognate reminiscences were preserved until they were incorporated into the law-book of the Mazdayasnians and the hymns of the Ṛig- Veda. That a real tradition is preserved in these books is undoubted, for we have seen that an examination of the tradi- tions preserved by the European branches of the Aryan race have led Prof. Rhys to the same conclusion ; and those who know the history of the preservation of our sacred books will see nothing improbable herein. In these days of writing and printing, we have no need to depend upon memory, and con- sequently we fail to realise what memory, kept under the strict- est discipline, is capable of achieving. The whole of the Ṛig- Veda, nay, the Veda and its nine supplementary books, have been preserved by the Brahmins of India, letter for letter and accent for accent, for the last 3000 or 4000 years at least ; and priests who have done so in recent times may well be credited with having faithfully preserved the traditions of the an- cient home, until they were incorporated into the sacred books. These achievements of disciplined memory may appear mar- vellous to us at present ; but, as stated above, they were looked upon as ordinary feats when memory was trusted better than books, and trained and cultivated with such special care as to be a faithful instrument for transmitting along many generations whatever men were most anxious to have remembered. It has been a fashion to cry down the class of priests who make it their sole profession to cultivate their me- mory by keeping it under strict discipline and transmit by its means our sacred writings without the loss of a single accent from genera- tion to generation. They have been described, even by scholars like Yâska, as the carriers of burden, and compared by others to parrots who repeat words without understanding their meaning. But the service, which this class has rendered to the cause of ancient his- tory and religion by preserving the oldest traditions of the race, is