INTRODUCTION.
India has not only preserved for us in her Yedas the most ancient and complete documents for the study of the old religious beliefs founded on nature-worship, which, in an extremely remote past, were common to all the branches of the Indo-European family ; she is also the only country where these beliefs, in spite of many changes both in form and fortune, continue to subsist up to the present time. Whilst everywhere else they have been either as good as extinguished by monotheistic religions of foreign origin, in some instances without leaving behind them a single direct and authentic trace of their presence, or abruptly cut short in their evolution and forced to survive within the barriers, henceforth immovable, of a petty Church, as in the case of Parseeism, — in India alone they present up to this time, as a rich and varied literature attests, a conti- nuous, self-determined development, in the course of which, instead of contracting, they have continued to enlarge their borders. It is owing in a great measure to this extraordinary longevity that such an interest attaches to the separate and independent study of the Hindu religions, irrespective alto- gether of the estimate we may form of their dogmatic or practical worth. Nowhere else do we meet with circum- stances, on the whole, so favourable for the study of the successive transformations and destiny, so to speak, of a
