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hymns, somewhat in the manner of the later Vedic schools or branches (çākhā) of one and the same Veda.

Large numbers of technical, ritualistic words and expressions crowd the pages of the Rig-Veda. Its metres are finished and conventional to a very high degree; they are also, to some extent, distributed among the gods, so that a given metre is associated especially with a certain god. For instance, the gāyatrī is the metre of the god Agni; the trishtubh the metre of the god Indra. They are also distributed to some extent according to the time of the day: the gāyatrī in the morning, the trishtubh at noon, the jagatī at evening. Above all, the advanced character of the Rig-Veda's ritual manifests itself in the large number of different designations for priests. These occur not only singly, but in series: the names of these priests are largely, though not entirely, the names of the priests of the later ceremonial.^[1]

And yet the poetry of the Rig-Veda is, in a deeper sense, original. It is primitive religious poetry, if by primitive we mean uninterrupted contact with the last source of its inspiration. The final judgment of its character, after all, depends not so much

1. ↑ See Hillebrandt, Rituallitteratur, p. 11 ff, and the literature cited on p. 17 of the same work.