to be called brāhmaṇa (apparently relating to the brahman or worship). In the White Yajur-Veda, it is separated into a work by itself, beside the saṁhitā or text of verse and formulas, and is called the Çatapatha-Brāhmaṇa Brāhmana of a hundred ways. Other similar collections are found, belonging to various other schools of Vedic study, and they bear the common name of Brāhmaṇa, with the name of the school, or some other distinctive title, prefixed. Thus, the Āitareya and Kāuṣītaki-Brāhmaṇas, belonging to the schools of the Rig-Veda, the Pañcaviṅça and Ṣaḍviṅça-Brāhmaṇas and other minor works, to the Sāma-Veda; the Gopatha-Brāhmaṇa, to the Atharva-Veda; and a Jāiminīya- or Talavakāra-Brāhmaṇa, to the Sāma-Veda, has recently (Burnell) been discovered in India; the Tāittirīya-Brāhmaṇa is a collection of mingled mantra and brāhmaṇa, like the saṁhitā of the same name, but supplementary and later. These works are likewise regarded as canonical by the schools, and are learned by their sectaries with the same extreme care which is devoted to the saṁhitās, and their condition of textual preservation is of a kindred excellence. To a certain extent, there is among them the possession of common material: a fact the bearings of which are not yet fully understood.
Notwithstanding the inanity of no small part of their contents, the Brāhmaṇas are of a high order of interest in their bearings on the history of Indian institutions; and philologically they are not less important, since they represent a form of language in most respects intermediate between the classical and that of the Vedas, and offer specimens on a large scale of a prose style, and of one which is in the main a natural and freely developed one — the oldest and most primitive Indo-European prose.
Beside the Brāhmaṇas are sometimes found later appendices, of a similar character, called Āraṇyakas (forest-sections): as the Āitareya-Āraṇyaka, Tāittirīya-Āraṇyaka, Bṛhad-Āraṇyakas, and so on. And from some of these, or even from the Brāhmaṇas, are extracted the earliest Upaniṣads (sittings, lectures on sacred subjects) — which,
