The Arctic Home in the Vedas c2.2.2

c2.2.2

I desire, however, to take this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging the generous sympathy shewn to me at a critical time by that venerable scholar Prof. 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 propriety, 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 are not treated better than ordinary convicts, and had it not been for the sympathy and interest taken by Prof. Max Muller, who knew me only as the author of Orion, and other friends, I should have been deprived of the pleasure,—then the only pleasure,—of following up my studies in these days. Prof. Max Muller was kind enough to send me a copy of his second edition of the Rig-Veda, and the Government was pleased to allow me the use of these and other books, and also of light to read for a few hours at night. Some of the passages from the Rig-Veda, quoted in support of the Arctic theory in the following pages, were collected during such leisure as I could get in these times.