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DECEMBER, 1898.]
IN MEMORIAM GEORGE BÜHLER.
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Though Bühler had learnt from Benfey the importance of Vedic studies as the true foundation of Sanskrit scholarship, and had devoted much time to this branch of learning, he did not publish much of the results of his own Vedic researches. His paper on Parjanya, however, published in 1862 in Benfey's Orient und Occident, Vol. I. p. 214, showed that he could not only decipher the old Vedic texts, but that he had thoronghly mastered the principles of Comparative Mythology, a new science which owed its very existence to the discovery of the Vedic Hymns, and was not very popular at the time with those who disliked the trouble of studying a now language. He wished to prove what Grimm had suspected, that Perjanya, Lit. Perkunas, Celt. Perkons, Slav. Perun, was one of the deities worshipped by the ancestors of the whole Aryan race, and in spite of the usual frays and bickerings, the main point of his argument has never been shaken. I saw much of him at that time, we often worked together and the Index to my History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature was chiefly his work. The important lesson which he had learnt from Benfey showed itself in the quickness with which he always seized on whatever was really important in the history of the literature of India. He did not write simply in order to show what he could do, but always in order to forward our knowledge of ancient India. This explains why, like Benfey's books, Bühler's own publications, even his smallest essays, are as useful to-day as they were when first published. Benfey's edition of the Indian fables of the Panchatantra produced a real revolution at the time of its publication. It opened our eyes to a fact hardly suspected before, how important a part in Sanskrit literature had been acted by Buddhist writers. We learnt in fact that the distinction between the works of Brahmanic and Buddhist authors bad been far too sharply drawn, and that in their literary parguits their relation had been for a long time that of friendly rivalry rather than of hostile opposition. Benfey showed that these Saiskřit fables of India had come to us through Buddhist hands, and had travelled from India step by step, station by station, through Pehlevi, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, and the modern languages of Europe, till they supplied even Lafontaine, with some of his most charming Fabliaux. Benfey was in many respects the true successor of Lassen in calling the attention of Sanskrit scholars to what are called in German the Realia of Sanskrit scholarship. He was bold enough to pablish the text and translation of the Sámapeda, and the glossary appended to this edition marked the first determined advance into the dark regions of Vedic thought. Though some of his interpretations may now be antiquated he did as much as was possible at the time, and nothing is more painful than to see scholars of a later generation speak slightingly of a man who was a giant before they were born. Benfey's varions Sanskrit grammars, founded as they are on the great classical grammar of PAğini, hold their own to the present day, and are indispenBable to every careful student of Pagini, while bis History of Sanskrit Philology is a real masterpiece, and remains still the only work in which that important chapter of modern scholarship can be safely studied.
Bühler was imbued with the same spirit that had guided Benfey, and every one of his early contributions to Benfey's Orient und Occident touched apon some really important question, even though he may not always have settled it. In his article on Deós, for instance (. . O., Vol. I. p. 508), which was evidently written under the influence of Curtius' recent warning that beds could not be equated with dews and Skt. déra without admitting a phonetic anomaly, he suggested that Bobs as well as the Old Norse diar, 'godb,' might be derived from a root dhí, to think, to be wise. Often as we discussed that etymology together and it was more than a mere etymology, because on it depended the question whether the oldest Aryan name of the gods in general was derived from the bright powers of Nature or from the more abstract idea of divine wiadom - he could never persnade me that these two branches of the Aryan race, the Greek and the Scandinavian, should have derived the general name for their gods from a root different from that which the other branches had used, vis., dio, 'to be brilliant, and from which they had formed the most important pluster of mythological names, such as Zeus, Jovis, Diespiter, Dia, Diana, etc. I preferred to
