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

186 THE ARCTIC HOME IN THE VEDAS.
appear rather inconsistent at the first sight; but the history
of words in any language will show that old expressions
are preserved in the language long after they have ceased
to denote the ideas primarily expressed by them. Thus
we now use coins for exchange, yet the word ‘pecuniary,’
which is derived from pecus = cattle, is still retained in
the language; and similarly, we still speak of the rising
of the sun, though we now know that it is not the lumi-
nary that rises, but the earth, by rotating round its axis,
makes the sun visible to us. Very much in the same way
and by the same process, expressions like saptâshva (seven-
horsed) or sapta-chakra (seven-wheeled), as applied to the
year or the sun, must have become recognised and esta-
blished as current phrases in the language before the hymns
assumed their present form, and the Vedic bards could
not have discarded them even when they knew that they
were not applicable to the state of things before them. On
the contrary, as we find in the Brâhmaņas, every artifice,
that ingenuity could suggest, was tried to make these old
phrases harmonise with the state of things then in vogue,
and from the religious or the sacrificial point of view it was
quite necessary to do so. But when we have to examine
the question from a historical stand-point, it is our duty to
separate the relics of the older period from facts or in-
cidents of the later period with which the former are some-
times inevitably mixed up; and if we analyse the verse in
question (I, 164, 12) in this way we shall clearly see in it
the traces of a year of ten months and five seasons. The
same principle is also applicable in other cases, as, for in-
stance, when we find the Navagvas mentioned together with
the seven vipras in VI, 22, 2. The bards, who gave us the
present version of the hymns, knew of the older or primeval
state of things only by traditions, and it is no wonder if
these traditions are occasionally mixed up with later events.