Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India Their Religion and Institutions

IN the present volunle I have reprinted with the addition of some new materials subsequently collected and of the texts on whiff they are founded a series of papers on the theogony mythology and religion ideas of the Vedic poets and other subjects which originally appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for 1864 and the two following years : and L [...] Nor have I considered it necessary to supply here any summary of the contents of the volume such as was given in the prefaces to the third and fourth volumes and in that to the second edition of the first volume. [...] IN the Fourth Volume of this work I:have collected the principal passages of the Vedic Hymns which refer to the origin of the nnverse and to the characters of thit gods Hiranyagarbha Vitivakarman Vishnu Rudra and the goddess Ambika; and have compared the representations there given of these deities with the later stories and speculations on the same subjects which are to be found in the Bra [...] I allude to the fact that we find in the Indian epic poems and Purities a god of the sea a god of war and a goddess of love who (the la two at least ) are unknown to the oldest parts of the Veda and yet rrespond in a general way to the Poseidon the Ares and the Aphrotte of the Greeks. [...] But the !Elder points of coincidence between the religious ideas of the Greeks and the Indians to which reference was first made are of a different character and are the udoubted remains of an original mythology which was common to the ancestors of both races.