Page:Atharva-Veda samhita.djvu/79

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6. The Prātiçākhya and its Commentary
lxxi

book: see p. 896, line 6. In matters of detail also, the treatise or its comment is sometimes of critical value: thus the non-inclusion of iḍas pade among the examples of the comment on APr. ii. 72 (see note) arouses the suspicion that vi. 63. 4 (see note) was not contained in the commentator's AV. text.

Utilization of the Atharvan Prātiçākhya for the present work.—Whitney's edition is provided with three easily usable indexes (not blind indexes): one of Atharvan passages, one of Sanskrit words, and a general index. The first gives in order some eight or nine hundred Atharvan passages, and gives nearly twelve hundred references to places in the Prātiçākhya or the comment or Whitney's notes, in which those passages are discussed. Whitney has transferred the references of the first index with very great fulness, if not with absolute completeness, to the pages of his Collation-Book, entering each one opposite the text of the verse concerned. Very many or most of them, after they have once been utilized in the constitution of the text of the Saṁhitā, are of so little further moment as hardly to be worth quoting in the present work; the rest will be found duly cited in the course of Whitney's commentary, and their value is obvious.

7. The Anukramaṇīs: "Old" and "Major"

More than one Anukramaṇī extant.—At the date of the preface to the Berlin edition, it was probably not clearly understood that there was more than one such treatise. The well-known one was the Major Anukramaṇī, the text of which was copied by Whitney from the ms. in the British Museum in 1853, as noticed below, p. lxxii. In making his fundamental transcript of the Atharvan text, certain scraps, looking like extracts from a similar treatise, were found by Whitney in the colophons of the several divisions of the mss. which he was transcribing, and were copied by him in his Collation-Book, probably without recognizing their source more precisely than is implied in speaking of them as "bits of extract from an Old Anukramaṇī, as we may call it" (see p. cxxxviii).

The Pañcapaṭalikā.—The Critical Notice in the first volume of the Bombay edition made it clear that the source of those scraps is indeed an old Anukramaṇī, and that it is still extant, not merely as scattered fragments, but as an independent treatise, and that its name is Pañcapaṭalikā. That name is used by "Sāyaṇa" when he refers to the treatise in his comm. to iii. 10. 7. In the main body of this work the treatise ia usually styled the "quoted Anukr." or the "old Anukr." The word "old" means old with reference to the Major Anukramaṇī; and since