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

iv PREFACE.
was, of course, not to be expected that a scholar, who had
worked all his life on a different line, would accept the new
view at once, and that too on reading a bare outline of the evi-
dence in its support. Still it was encouraging to hear from him
that though the interpretations of Vedic passages proposed by
me were probable, yet my theory appeared to be in conflict with
the established geological facts. I wrote in reply that I had
already examined the question from that stand-point, and ex-
pected soon to place before him the whole evidence in support
of my view. But, unfortunately, I have been deprived of
this pleasure by his deeply mourned death which occurred
soon after.
The first manuscript of the book was written at the end of
1898, and since then I have had the advantage of discussing the
question with many scholars in Madras, Calcutta, Lahore,
Benares and other places during my travels in the different parts
of India. But I hesitated to publish the book for a long time,—
a part of the delay is due to other causes,—because the lines of
investigation had ramified into many allied sciences such as
geology, archæology, comparative mythology and so on; and, as I
was a mere layman in these, I felt some diffidence as
to whether I had correctly grasped the bearing of the
latest researches in these sciences. The difficulty is well
described by Prof. Max Muller in his review of the Pre-
historic Antiquities of Indo-Europeans, published in the volume of
his Last Essays. “The ever-increasing division and sub-division,”
“observes the learned Professor, “of almost every branch of human
knowledge into more special branches of study make the specialist,
whether he likes it or not, more and more dependent on the judg-
ment and the help of his fellow-workers. A geologist in our day
has often to deal with questions that concern the mineralogist,
the chemist, the archæologist, the philologist, nay, the the astro-
nomer, rather than the geologist pur et simple, and, as