1866.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 149 



and never were touched beyond the four walls of the college pre- 

 mises. Ten years after him, Dr. Ballantyne of Benares brought his 

 extensive learning and ripe scholarship to bear upon the vexed question 

 of Indian technical terms, and ended by publishing a treatise on Chemis- 

 try, the most technical of all the sciences of the present day, with the 

 whole of its terms rendered into correct Sanskrit. Since then, the prac- 

 tice in Bengal has been uniformly to translate foreign terms, and all 

 our school books (and the Calcutta School Book Society issues a hundred 

 thousand volumes every year) are produced on that principle. There 

 are however, a few exceptions. I allude to the publications of the verna- 

 cular branch of the Calcutta Medical College. There transliteration is 

 the rule exclusively, and in some of them their authors go the length 

 of bodily transcribing such words as a hot bath and a sand bath, 

 and produce in Bengali letters hat a hatha and sdnda hatha, as if the 

 native languages had not words enough in their vocabularies to 

 indicate hot water or sand or a bath. To an Englishman a sand 

 bath may not be an ordinary everyday thing, but there is not 

 a village boy in the obscurest part of India who has tasted a hand- 

 ful of parched rice, who does not know what a sand bath or a 

 hdllr khold is. A learned Professor of the College, himself a native 

 of this country, gravely told me the other day that the hot bath 

 implied a certain fixed amount of heat, which the translated word 

 would not imply, as if in English or even in Medical phraseology 

 the word hot implied a fixed degree of Fahrenheit's thermometer 

 and no other. Sir, the resolution before the meeting, if adopted, 

 would in a manner place the imprimatur of the Society on this folly 

 of hata hatha. If it be desirable to encourage the study of the sciences 

 and to naturalize them in India, we must make them easily accessible, 

 and bring them home to every man's mind. We must offer them 

 in simple and homely forms, clothed in the easiest language and 

 divested as much as possible of mystical formula and jaw-breaking 

 foreign terms. By adopting the terminology of Europe in vernacular 

 books, we do the very reverse of this. We offer a set of words, many 

 of which, to the generality of the people, will appear in so transmontane 

 an aspect, that they will be taken more for mantras, or charms and incan- 

 tations for driving away ghosts and overcoming evil spirits, than sober 

 terms for indicating natural phenomena and every-day occurrences and 



