104- Dr. Hodgkin on the Importance of Studying and 



rendered them an important service, and receive in return the 

 most valuable cooperation which we can at present seek. 



If missionaries have the means of obtaining the most minute 

 and accurate information in consequence of their longer resi- 

 dence amongst the natives of uncivilized countries, the captains 

 and medical men serving on board our merchant vessels have 

 the advantage of affording more frequent opportunities of com- 

 munication ; and from the circumstance of their visiting several 

 tribes in succession, they have facilities for instituting compa- 

 risons and discovering resemblances, provided their attention 

 were turned to the subject, which the missionary confined to 

 a particular spot does not possess. We should therefore do 

 well to seek the assistance of merchants, both individually and 

 in their associations ; and from their well-known liberality 

 and benevolence we may reasonably hope that the appeal will 

 not be made in vain. Several mercantile expeditions have 

 already made important contributions to our stock of know- 

 ledge of the description to which I am alluding; and were the 

 appeal which I have just proposed at all generally attended 

 to, materials would be more rapidly collected than by any 

 other process which could be suggested, and at the same time 

 a great collateral advantage would be gained in the improve- 

 ment which it would be likely to produce in the treatment 

 which the uncivilized nations too often receive from the crews 

 of our merchant vessels, whose abuses in this respect appear to 

 be most supinely and culpably neglected. 



Another method of promoting the object which I have had 

 in view would be to bring home to this country the living 

 languages themselves, which would give to the masters of 

 philological research a better opportunity of pursuing their 

 investigations than they could find in vocabularies collected 

 by travellers, even though more care were to be taken in ob- 

 taining them than perhaps has hitherto l>een generally the 

 case. The advantages of the plan proposed, namely, that 

 of bringing home living languages themselves in the mouths 

 of the natives, would very much depend on the care which 

 should be exercised in the selection of individuals : the object 

 should be to choose the most intelligent. Where missiona- 

 ries and others have succeeded in introducing schools, the 

 best mode of selection would probably be to take two or 

 three of the most intelligent and best-informed, who might 

 be brought forward by a regular competition or concours. 

 The voyage to Europe, being thus contended for like an 

 open fellowship at an university, would afford a great stimu- 

 lus to the scholars in these schools, and would therefore 

 benefit the people from whom the lads were selected, whilst it 



