30 President's Address. [Feb. 



cal investigations. It serves the double end of placing, so to speak, original 

 materials within easy reach of every inquirer, and of taking evidence, as it 

 were de hene esse, which otherwise might pass iri-ecoverably away. This 

 risk of disappearance, to which I allude, is by no means imaginary, for 

 Mr. Locke infers from a comparison of the sketch of Bhobaneswar given in 

 Sterling's paper on Orissa, (published in the volume of our Transactions 

 for 1825) with the present features of the ground, that as many as eight or 

 ten or even more of the smaller temples have within, say, the last forty years, 

 sunk into confused masses, or ill-defined jungle-covered mounds of ruins. 



No one, I suppose, will doubt that the tale, which would be told by the 

 archaic remains of Khandagiri and Bhobaneswar, if they could be rightly inter- 

 preted,would be historically most important. The Khandagiri caves bear ample 

 indicia of a Budhist origin. But I believe that the Principal pf our School of 

 Art considers there is also a Greek element plainly perceptible in the ornament ; 

 I do not now refer to the dress, worn by the booted figure of the Rani's cave, 

 which, notwithstanding its foreign appearance, Babu Hajendralala supposes 

 to be indigenous to this country ; I speak of the conventional ornament on 

 the mouldings and friezes. And then, if we pass over to Bhobaneswar, we 

 find ourselves in the presence of a type of Hindu art, which is at any rate 

 in this sense archaic, namely, that the forms assumed by the temples were 

 developed in the infancy of structural resource. The lofty prismoidal tower 

 gradually rounded in at the top and surmounted by a lotus-shaped crown, is not 

 at first sight I think pleasing to the eye ; but it is easy to understand how it 

 might have grown out of the exigencies under which the builder worked. 

 Without the aid of cement, and in the absence of any knowledge of the 

 arch, the horizontal section, which could be effectually covered over by over- 

 lapping slabs of stone would necessarily be small, and therefore it would be 

 by height alone that the designer could give any imposing character to his 

 building. At first, too, the sides of such a building would probably be 

 left comparatively free of ornament ; but assuredly the eye of the Hindu 

 architect would not long tolerate plain surfaces ; he would soon learn to break 

 them with ribs, and enrich them with carvuig. At a later stage, we might 

 anticipate that the ribs would develop into turrets, or minarets, mitil even 

 the coherence of the whole structure might be endangered, by the separate 

 individuality which the subordinate parts had acquired. Whether or not 

 this has been the real course of development, I will not pretend to speculate. 

 But certamly there are at Bhobaneswar specimens of states of building very 

 like those I have imagined. Then, too, in those cases where the wealth of 

 decorative ornament is extreme, and I may say at first sight bewildering 

 from its copiousness, a close examination shows that, after all, the whole is 

 little more than repetition on repetition of certain comparatively few forms, 

 examples of each of which appear on almost every temple. One of the 



