Page 563 - Lokmanya Tilak Samagra (khand 2)

344 SAMAGRA TILAK - 2 • THE ARCTIC HOME

theory of the primeval Arctic home of the Aryan races is in pefect
accord with the latest and most approved geological facts and
opinions. A primeval Arctic home would have been regarded an
impossibility, had not science cleared the ground by establishing that
the antiquity of man goes back to the Tertiary era, that the climate
of the Polar regions was mild and temperate in inter-glacial times,
and that it was rendered cold and inclement by the advent of
the· Glacial epoch. We can now also understand why attempt
to prove the existence of an Arctic home by discovering references
to severe winter and cold in the Vedas did not succeed in the past.
The winter in the primeval home was originally, that is, in inter-
glacial times, neither severe nor inclement, and if such expressions
as "a hundred winters" ( shatam himah) ~re found in the Vedic
literature, they cannot be taken for re~iniscences of severe cold
winters in the original home; for the expression came into use
probably because the year in the original home closed with a winter
characterised by the long Arctic night. It was the advent of the Ice
Age that destroyed the mild climate of the original home and
converted it into an icebound land unfit for the habitation of man.
This is well expressed in the A vesta which describes the Airy ana
V~jo as a happy land subsequently converted by the invasion of
Angra Mainyu into a land of severe winter and snow. This corres-
pondence between the A vestic description of the original home
and the result of the latest geological researches, at once enables
us to fix the age of the Arctic home, for it is now a well-settled
scientific fact that a mild climate in the Polar regions was possible
only in the inter-Glacial and not in the post-Glacial times.
But according to some geologists 20,000 or even 80,000
years have passed since the close of the last Glacial epoch; and
as the oldest date assigned to the Vedic hymns does not go
beyond 4500 B. C., it may be contended that the traditions of
the Ice Age, or of the inter-Glacial home, cannot .be supposed to
have been accurately preserved by oral transmission for thousands
of years that elapsed between the commencement of the
post-Glacial era and the oldest date of the Vedic hymns. It is,
therefore, necessary to examine the point a little more closely
in this place. In my Orion or Researches into the antiquity of the
Vedas, I have shown that while the Taittiriya Samhita and the
Brahma~as begin the Nak~hatras with the Krittikas or the Pleiades,
showing that the vernal equinox then coincided with the aforesaid