128 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [June, 



lately had occasion to look over many papers, and I could not but be 

 struck with the profuseness of Oriental knowledge to be found in 

 earlier as compared with later years. To take one small example ; I 

 cannot believe that if, in the beginning of the century, we had been as 

 intimate with Cashmir, as we have been during the last twenty years, 

 we should have known so little of the language. 



" The fact seems to be, that we have of late years to a great extent 

 taken up this position, that the natives must come to us ; we won't go 

 to them. And having so entrenched ourselves, as it were, we have 

 little in common with the natives most learned after their own fashion. 

 As Mr. Macleod puts it, " The most cultivated minds amongst our 

 race and yours have remained but too often widely apart, each being 

 unable either to understand or to appreciate the other." In truth, I 

 fear that in some respects the gulf between the two races is rather 

 widening than narrowing. The old intercourse in native fashion 

 becomes less. The men whose minds are saturated with English 

 classics, justly feel that they are above intercourse on the old unequal 

 footing of European ruler and Native ruled ; and at the same time they 

 have too seldom really acquired that substantially English tone of 

 mind, that renders possible frank and cordial intercourse after the 

 English fashion. 



" Without then in any way putting it as opposed to English learn- 

 ing, I think we must all join in considering that every effort towards 

 Oriental and vernacular learning, is in itself a good. So far from such 

 learning being opposed to English learning, I believe that it is just 

 the contrary. As Railways have not superseded roads and carriages, 

 but, on the contrary, these latter are more than ever used as feeders to 

 Railways, so also I believe that the use of the vernacular languages, 

 as the medium of communicating European learning on a broader and 

 more general scale than is now possible, and the contact of English 

 with Oriental scholars in the use of the language of the latter, would 

 create and whet an appetite for those larger stores of learning which 

 English only can afford. It seems therefore to me that in the present 

 stage of our progress, when so many natives have so good a knowledge 

 of English, and the higher branches of education are so exclusively Eng- 

 lish, there is also much room for the encouragement of Oriental learning 

 in two ways : first, by translating into the Vernacular books of European 



