1904.] Annual Address. 25 



movement whicb is now in progress — the scramble for possessions, trade 

 interests and points d* appui in Asia. It is indeed hardly a paradox to 

 say that if any one in this country is in want of a stimulus in the parti- 

 cular branch of study in which he is engaged, he will best find it in a 

 visit to Europe and in contact with fellow- worker's there. Any one of a 

 dozen Societies will give bim a cordial reception, and their enthusiasm 

 revive his flagging energies. He will realise that the study of Indian 

 subjects holds a higher place than it has ever done, that it is no longer 

 treated as a thing apart which can be ignored with impunity, but that it 

 enters into the solution of problems which a generation ago no one would 

 have dreamed of approaching from the Indian point of view. Nor do I 

 admit that the Europeans at work in India at the present day know less 

 about the country and the people than their predecessors of a century 

 ago. Of the country as a whole they know infinitely more because they 

 have seen more, because trains and steamers move faster than boats 

 and palanquins. Of tlie people also they can know more if they choose 

 to take the trouble, for they have a better start. A good deal has been 

 done of recent years by Mr. Crooke and others to arrange and systematise 

 the vast mass of ethnographic information that is available. The 

 ethnographic survey will add greatly to our stock of knowledge, and I 

 am glad to be able to inform the society that for Assam the Hon. Mr. 

 Fuller has modified the original scheme on lines which will give us a 

 series of illustrated monographs on the tribes of that interesting province. 

 In two or three years' time I hope that any one in any Province who de- 

 sires to understand the structure and usages of Indian Society will find 

 adequate guidance through the preliminary stages of the subject. It 

 will rest with him to break new ground and to extend by research the 

 information that has been placed at his disposal. For ignorance at any 

 rate there will no longer be any excuse, and there will be the basis for 

 that higher form of knowledge which consist in understanding the ways 

 of alien races and appreciating their point of view. 



For the real causes of the diminished influence of the Society we 

 must look back to the history of its own growth and development. 

 When our first President, Sir William Jones, gave to the world, as Sir 

 Henry Maine admirably put it, " the modern science of Philology and 

 the modern theory of Kace," the Asiatic Society of Bengal had a prac- 

 tical monopoly of the new learning. The Calcutta scholars of that day, 

 Jones, Colebrooke, Wilkins and Wilson, all of them active members of 

 this Society, were the pioneers of the Sanskrit Renaissance as the Greek 

 scholars of the 15th Century were of the revival of learning in Europe. 

 Bat Calcutta was not long to remain the centre of Sanskrit studies, 

 When the German Universities entered the field guided by Humboldt 



