294 Report upon the Construction of [No. 124. 



finish as to be comparable, if not as good, as the best which London 

 can produce. 



I believe no one, either youth or adult, who was at all interested 

 in the pleasures of the pursuit of science, has ever left a lecture room in 

 London without a secret wish, that he could himself repeat the experi- 

 ments he has seen performed, and a regret that the apparatus required 

 were beyond his means ; and no one intimately acquainted with the 

 character of Natives, and with the keen vivacity with which they regard 

 any thing new or wonderful, will doubt the feeling of regret and humili- 

 ation with which they must regard the beautiful apparatus as finished 

 by European workmen ; while they examine a balance which takes 

 nearly two minutes to perform a single oscillation, and wonder how it 

 can be made to move so slow and regularly, and which is capable of 

 rendering sensible a quantity no greater than the millionth part of the 

 load which it sustains; when they are told that such an instrument 

 cannot be purchased for less than 500 rupees, and that its execution is 

 utterly beyond the capacity of the Natives of India, and that no instru- 

 ment submitted to their inspection can they ever be permitted to handle 

 or to use, and if not in affluent circumstances hardly any of the simplest 

 can they ever hope to purchase. It may happen that the idea may 

 strike them, that under such circumstances, what may be the value of 

 listening to an abstract detail of philosophical facts, which they can 

 never hope to investigate themselves, or to prove to their own satisfac- 

 tion, that they are founded upon truth. 



Besides this, the practical application of scientific knowledge can 

 never be turned to account, without a familiar knowledge of the 

 technical mode of exemplifying it. 



On the contrary, how much it must assist a teacher of science in 

 being able to fix the attention of his auditory by telling them, that there 

 is not an article exhibited to their view, beautiful and wonderful as they 

 at first may appear, which has not been made by Natives of India, at a 

 price which any but the most indigent can afford, and which any one 

 may become capable of constructing, if they pay attention to the ex- 

 planation of the principles upon which the instruments have been 

 formed. 



That Native workmen are capable of this I have endeavoured to 

 shew in a former report, and have instanced in the allusion to an in- 



