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

PREHISTORIC TIMES. 7.
is not so comprehensive. I intend to confine myself only to
the Vedic literature and show that if we read some of the pas-
sages in the Vedas, which have hitherto been considered
incomprehensible, in the light of the new scientific discoveries,
we are forced to the conclusion that the home of the ancestors
of the Vedic people was somewhere near the North Pole before
the last Glacial epoch. The task is not an easy one, consider-
ing the fact that the Vedic passages, on which I rely, had to
be, and have been, hitherto either ignored or explained away
somehow, or misinterpreted one way or another by Native and
European scholars alike. But I hope to show that these inter-
pretations, though they have been provisionally accepted, are
not satisfactory, and that new discoveries in archæology and
geology provide us with a better key for the interpretation of
these passages. Thus if some of the conclusions of the my-
thologist and the philologist are overthrown by these discoveries,
they have rendered a still greater service by furnishing us with
a better key for the interpretation of the most ancient Aryan
legends, and the results obtained by using the new key cannot,
in their turn, fail to throw further light on the primitive history
of the Aryan race, and thus supplement or modify the conclusion
now arrived at by the archæologist and the geologist.
But before proceeding to discuss the Vedic texts which point
out to a Polar home, it is necessary to briefly state the results
of recent discoveries in archæology, geology and palæontology.
My summary must necessarily be very short, for I propose
to note down only such facts as will establish the proba-
bility of my theory from the geological and palæontological
point of view; and for this purpose I have freely drawn
upon the works of such well-known writers as Lyell, Geikie,
Evans, Lubbock, Croll, Taylor and others. I have also utilised
the excellent popular summary of the latest results of these
researches in Samuel Laing's Human Origins and other