Excerpt from Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 16 My own treatment of the legend, undertaken somewhat shame facedly after so many painstaking efforts on the part of my prede cessors, is justified by a greatel sympathy for the versions of the story, and the allusions made to it, in the entire litei ature, as far as it was accessible to me. Certainly all former attempts are deficient on the very face of them, because they do not pay due regard to the later forms of the legend. They do not endeavor to Show how the veisions of the Brahmanas, which in the most familiar manner substitute the gayatri-metie in the place of the eagle, could have arisen upon the bas1s of the form of the legend in the mantras. I shall endeavor to show that the gayatri is the mystic sacerdotal name of Agni, the heavenly Agni (the light ning), who Is the eagle. The legend contains the description of the flight forth of the lightning from the womb of the cloud, as the lightning shoots from the cloud, the heavenly fluid, the Soma, streams down upon the earth. The individual points of the, myth will appear in greater detail in the course of this expo sition. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.