1866] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. 169 



may, with very few additions, suffice to convey as much knowledge as 

 the people generally either require or are capable of acquiring. 

 Scientific technology and nomenclature are chiefly required because 

 Science deals with new and rigorous conceptions, and because she 

 recognises distinctions which are not recognized in popular language ; 

 since the masses who use that language, do not find it necessary to 

 draw such distinctions. When these new conceptions and rigorous 

 distinctions are learned and recognised, a scientific language is re- 

 quired to express them with precision ; but the acquisition of the 

 ideas and knowledge of things is the essential and really difficult part 

 of the process, and the sounds which denote them are very easily 

 learned, when their meaning has once become familiar. I have found 

 in my own experience at the College, that students learn technical terms 

 much more readily than they acquire the ideas they are intended to con- 

 vey. The error, which, as I conceive, has pervaded the greater part of 

 my friend Babu Rajendralal Mitra's eloquent address, affords an illus- 

 tration to the point. He has frequently used a very technical term, 

 * connotation, ' a term certainly not much used in ordinary conversation 

 or writing, but he has used that term — not in its rigorous technical 

 sense, — but as if it were synonymous with c descriptive etymology.' 

 Indeed his main argument rests upon the assumption, that as a general 

 rule, the root- words of which a technical term is compounded, inform 

 us of the meaning of the term itself, (the ' connotation' or posses : 

 si on of certain distinguishing characters which the term implies.) 

 ■This, as I shall endeavour to shew, is by no means a common character 

 of the nomenclature of science, of the naming of objects ; equally little 

 is it the case with scientific terminology, or the technical terms by 

 which objects and their relations are described ; and if this be so, I 

 think the whole argument that has been based on the assumed identity 

 of 'meaning' and 'etymology,' by confounding them under the unfamiliar 

 term £ connotation,' falls to the ground. That so erroneous an idea should 

 ever have been adopted, is, I imagine, in great part due to the method, 

 by which, in a measure perhaps unavoidably, it has been attempted 

 to teach Natural Science in this country. As I have elsewhere 

 observed, this has been mainly a book teaching of names and words, not 

 of things, or of the ideas which the knowledge of things suggests ; and 

 it is no wonder therefore, if, in the absence of the objects and visible 



