word for god, _deva_ [deus], no longer means the 'shining one' [the
god], but the 'burning oblation'; the common word for mountain,
_giri_ also means oblation, and so on. This is Bergaigne's allegorical
mysticism run mad.

At such perversion of reasonable criticism is the exegesis of the Veda
arrived in one direction. But in another it is gone astray no less, as
misdirected by its clever German leader. In three volumes[21]
Brunnhofer has endeavored to prove that far from being a Brahmanic
product, the Rig Veda is not even the work of Hindus; that it was
composed near the Caspian Sea long before the Aryans descended into
India. Brunnhofer's books are a mine of ingenious conjectures, as
suggestive in detail as on the whole they are unconvincing. His
fundamental error is the fancy that names and ideas which might be
Iranian or Turanian would prove, if such they really could be shown to
be, that the work in which they are contained must be Iranian or
Turanian. He relies in great measure on passages that always have been
thought to be late, either whole late hymns or tags added to old
hymns, and on the most daring changes in the text, changes which he
makes in order to prove his hypothesis, although there is no necessity
for making them. The truth that underlies Brunnhofer's extravagance is
that there are foreign names in the Rig Veda, and this is all that he
has proved thus far.

In regard to the relation between the Veda and the Avesta the
difference of views is too individual to have formed systems of
interpretation on that basis alone. Every competent scholar recognizes
a close affinity between the Iranian Yima and the Hindu Yama, between
the _soma_-cult and the _haoma_-cult, but in how far the thoughts and
forms that have clustered about one development are to be compared