Page 205 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

4 SAMAORA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME

the observation was possible only at about 4650 B. C. thereby
remarkably confirming my estimate of the oldest period of Vedic
literature. After this, the high antiquity of the oldest Vedic period
may, I think, be now taken as fairly established.
But if the age of the oldest Vedic period was thus carried
back to 4500 B. C., one was still tempted to ask whether we bad,
in that limit, reached the ultima Thule of the Aryan antiquity.
For, as stated by Prof. Bloomfield, while noticing my Orion in
his address on the occasion of the eighteenth anniversary of
John Hopkin's University, " the language and literature of the
Vedas is, by no means, so primitive as to place with it the real
beginnings of Aryan life. " " These in all probability and in all
due moderation, " he rightly observed, " reach back several
thousands of years more, and it was," he said, "therefore, needless
to point out that this curtain, which seems to shut off our
vision at 4500 B. C., may prove in the end a veil of thin gauze. "
I myself held the same view, and much of my spare time dur-
ing the last ten years bas been devoted to the search of evi-
dence \\hich would lift up this curtain and reveal to us the long
vista of primitive Aryan antiquity. How I first worked on the
lines followed up in Orion, how in the light of latest researches
in geology and archreology bearing on the primitive history of
man, I was gradually led to a different line of search, and finally
how the conclusion,. that the ancestors of the Vedic ~ishis lived
in an Arctic home in inter-Glacial times, was forced on me by the
slowly accumulating mass of Vedic and Avestic evidence, is fully
narrated in the book, and need not, therefore, be r~peated in
this place. I desire, however, to take this opportunity of gratefully
acknowledging the generous sympathy shewn to me at a critical
time by that venerable scholar Pr9f. F. Max MUller, whose recent
death was mourned as a personal loss by his numerous admirers
throughout India. This is not the place where we may, with pro-
priety, discuss the merits of the policy adopted by the Bombay
Government in 1897. Suffice it to say that in order to put down
certain public excitement, caused by its own famine and
plague policy, the Government of the day deemed it prudent
to prosecute some Vernacular papers in the province, and
prominently amongst them the Kesari, edited by me, for writings
which were held to be seditious, and I was awarded eighteen
months' rigorous imprisonment. But political offenders in India