124 INDO-IRANIAN LANGUAGES 



The labors of the Linguistic Survey of India, which have been carried 

 on during recent years under the auspices of the Indian Government 

 and under the able direction of Dr. G. A. Grierson, will vastly advance 

 our knowledge of the classification, the relationships, and the general 

 linguistic character of all the languages of India and of their almost 

 innumerable dialects. Six of the sixteen parts which will embody 

 the work- of the Survey have already appeared. The results of the 

 Survey as a whole have also been summarized and form a part of 

 the Indian Census Report for 1901, which has been published in three 

 volumes (1903). This report, which contains a vast amount of valu- 

 able information regarding the present condition of the population 

 of India in its various aspects, well deserves to be studied by all who 

 are interested in Indian affairs. 



In conclusion, I should like to make some observations regard- 

 ing Indian languages from an educational point of view. The main 

 problem here seems to me to be, how Sanskrit, which, together with 

 its literature, is the key to the languages and civilization of modern 

 India, is to be made the instrument of mental training in the schools 

 and universities of India, as Latin and Greek are in Europe and 

 America. At present it is by no means such an instrument, either 

 under the native traditional system or the European method of 

 teaching Sanskrit in India. The native system consists in learning 

 certain books by an abnormal exercise of memory, to the great 

 detriment of the reasoning powers. It is bound to die out with the 

 spread of Western educational methods, which must take its place. 

 Western methods, however, as at present applied in the Government 

 colleges, to the teaching of Sanskrit, are even more unsatisfactory. 

 For memory is still the main faculty relied on, and that in a much 

 less disinterested way. A certain number of books, prescribed in a 

 somewhat haphazard way, are got up, generally with the aid of inade- 

 quate editions, not with a view to knowing them, but solely to passing 

 the examinations necessary for the attainment of a degree. The evil 

 is aggravated by the fact that the Indian Government has of late 

 years adopted the policy of appointing only native scholars to chairs 

 of Sanskrit. The consequence is that there is no longer any means 

 of teaching native students Sanskrit scientifically or of training 

 them in methods of research. Under these conditions there will 

 before long not be a Sanskrit scholar in the true sense of the word 

 left in India. The sort of scholarship to be expected in future will be 

 of the type indicated by the following anecdote. According to a rule 

 of the Bibliotheca Indica, no text was allowed to be edited in that 

 series except from three independent manuscripts. A certain native 

 scholar wished to edit here a text of which he possessed one manu- 

 script only. The difficulty would have appeared insurmountable 

 to the Occidental. But the Indian mind is nothing if not ingenious. 



