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lxxvi
General Introduction, Part I.: by the Editor

results is doubtful; but the relation of the two groupings is a matter no less important than it is obscure. The obscurity is especially striking in book xviii., where the natural order of the component rites of the long funeral ceremony is wholly disregarded by the diaskeuasts in the actual arrangement of the verses of the Saṁhitā. Thus xviii. 4. 44, which accompanies the taking of the corpse on a cart to the pyre, ought of course to precede xviii. 2. 4, which accompanies the act of setting fire to the pile. See my remark, below, page 870, lines 7-9, and my discussion, pages 870-1, of "Part III." and "Part V." of xviii. 4. As is noted at xviii. 1. 49 and 2. 1, the ritual group of verses that accompany the oblations to Yama in the cremation-ceremony wholly disregards even so important a division as that between two successive anuvāka-hymns. It is pointed out on p. 848 that verse 60 of xviii. 3 is widely separated from what appears (most manifestly and from various criteria) to be its fellow, to wit, verse 6.

Many difficulties of the Kāuçika yet unsolved.—It will very likely appear that Whitney has misunderstood the Kāuçika here and there; as also, on the other hand, he has in fact here and there corrected the text or the interpretation of Garbe or of Bloomfield. At the time of Whitney's death, Bloomfield's chief contributions (SBE. xlii.) to the interpretation of Kāuçika had not yet appeared, nor yet those of Caland. As I have more than once said, no one ought to be so well able to give a trustworthy translation of a difficult text as the man who has made a good edition of it; and for this reason one must regret that Bloomfield did not give us—in the natural sequence of the sūtras—as good a version as he was at the time able to make, instead of the detached bits of interpretation which are scattered through the notes of SBE. xlii. Caland observes, in the introduction to his Zauberritual, p. IV, that in using the Kāuçika he soon found that, in order to comprehend even a single passage, it is necessary to work through the whole book. The like is, of course, equally true of the Prātiçākhya. A commentator upon the Saṁhitā who wishes (as did Whitney) to combine in his comment the best of all that the subsidiary treatises have to offer, cannot of course stop to settle, en passant, a multitude of questions any one of which may require the investigation of a specialist. Thus Whitney, in his note to X. 5. 6, said in his ms. for the printer, "The Kāuç. quotes the common pratīka of the six verses at 49. 3, in a witchcraft-ceremony, in connection with the releasing of a bull." If Caland is right (Zauberritual, p. 171), the hocus-pocus with the "water-thunderbolts" does not begin until 49. 3, and the svayam is to be joined to the preceding sūtra (ZDMG. liii. 211), and the letting loose of the bull (49. 1) has nothing to do with the uses of x. 5. This is just the kind of error which we cannot fairly