24 The Religion of the Veda.

The river Ganges, so essential to a. picture of India in historical times, and even more bound up with 3.11 Western poetic fancies about Indie, is scarcely mentioned in the Rig-Veda. This same text is full of allusions to the struggles of the foimkinnorl Aryns with the darkaskinned aborigines, the Busyns. The struggle is likely to have been hitter. The spread of Aryan civilisation was gradual, and re-r sultcd finally in the up~building of a people whose civilisation was foreign and superior, but whose race quality was determined a good deal by the oven» whelmingly large, native, derkekinned, lioxmuflrynn pOpulation. At the beginning of our knowledge of '5 India we are face to face with an extensive poet“ icel literature, in set metros. This is crude on the; “Inhole, even when compared with classical Sanskrit literature of later times. Yet, it shows, along with uncouth naiveté and semiubarbarous ( turgidity, a. good deal of beauty and elevation of thought, and a, degree of skill bordering on the professional, in the handling of language and metre. That this product was not created out of nothing on Indian soil follows from the previously mentioned close connection with the earliest product of Persian literature, the limestofiit Even the metric types of Veda and Avesta are closely related.

1See above, p. I3.

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