And we have also heard from
our retreats, how Dugald Stewart and his colleagues, upon seeing that
the discovery would also involve ethnological affinities, and damage the
prestige of those sires of the world races--Shem, Ham and Japhet--denied
in the face of fact that "Sanskrit had ever been a living, spoken
language," supporting the theory that "it was an invention of the
Brahmins, who had constructed their Sanskrit on the model of the Greek
and Latin." And again we know, holding the proof of the same, how the
majority of Orientalists are prone to go out of their way to prevent any
Indian antiquity (whether MSS. or inscribed monument, whether art or
science) from being declared pre-Christian. As the origin and history
of the Gentile world is made to move in the narrow circuit of a few
centuries "B.C.," within that fecund epoch when mother earth,
recuperated from her arduous labours of the Stone age, begat, it seems
without transition, so many highly civilized nations and false
pretenses, so the enchanted circle of Indian archeology lies between the
(to them unknown) year of the Samvat era, and the tenth century of the
Western chronology.
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