1866.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 151 



words in the mouths of the natives will be so far Indianised as to 

 be almost unrecognizable by an Englishman. The English omelet is 

 with the native cook a mamlet and the haricot mutton a hanri kabdb. I 

 wonder what the triple phosphate, tri-ethyl-emyl-platino-phosphonium 

 will sound like in a purely Punjabi mouth, even if the boasted 

 perfection of the Sanskritic alphabet could reduce it to writing 

 without murdering its character. But supposing, for the sake of 

 argument that English scientific terms could be reproduced by Indian 

 alphabets and preserved unchanged in the vernaculars, what would be 

 the advantage gained by importing them ? We could not hold 

 converse with, or convey our thoughts on any scientific subject to 

 an European, on the strength of a common terminology, without 

 knowing his language. A few idle teachers are all that would benefit 

 by the proposed measure, and they are the last to be pitied. The 

 primary, the great, the only object of technical terms is to systematise 

 science, and thereby to facilitate the acquisition of knowledge ; to that 

 must be sacrificed all other considerations ; and inasmuch as a nation 

 learns the terminology of a science more easily in its own mother- 

 tongue than in a foreign language, the vernacular is the best material 

 with which to prepare its scientific terms. It is true that those 

 terms are mere names, and " all names," according to Hobbes, "are 

 words taken at pleasure to serve for a mark, which may raise in our 

 mind thoughts like to some thoughts we had before, and which being 

 pronounced to others, may be, to them, signs of what thoughts the 

 speaker had, or had not, before his mind ;" and as such, English words 

 may serve as signs to the Indians quite as well as native words. But 

 scientific terms have something more to do than serve as mere signs. 

 They are not proper names, or what the logicians call " non-connota- 

 tive" terms, arbitrarily assigned to particular objects. They do not, like 

 Mr. Black or Mr. White, indicate particular individuals by arbitrary 

 assignment, without regard to the power of the words as expressive 

 of blackness and whitness. They are emblems intimately associated 

 with their original meanings ; they are like the sutras of our revered 

 Rishis, intended to convey a whole train of ideas by a few expressive 

 signs. The moment they cease to convey those ideas, they cease 

 to be scientific terms, and become the jargon of the cabalists. Chemistry 

 became a science only when Lavoisier and his co-labourers reduced it 



