82 
SCENES IN TNDIA. 
It is indeed pitiful to see women, often lovely 
beyond what conception can shadow forth in the mere 
external graces, or what may be called the accidents 
of form and feature, yet lapped in an ignorance so 
profound as to stifle the sweetest associations to which 
the sight of beauty, under whatever aspect, must give 
rise, and realize the humiliating reality of the mere 
animal, in which the mind is utterly merged and al- 
most brutalized. I should impute the social degrada- 
tion of the modern Hindoos much to the ignorance in 
which their women are suffered to live, and the domes- 
tic tyranny to which they are subjected ; for it has ever 
been found that man becomes refined in proportion as 
woman is intelligent, and that where there is not a 
high and delicate respect for the gentler sex, there 
never can be a perfect civilization ; — of which the mo- 
ral disorder, now so distorted a feature in the character 
of Hindoo society, appears to me a sad but irrefragable 
evidence. 
However the native of Hindostan may look upon 
woman, a proof of the beauty of her mind and the 
noble powers of her intellect is exhibited in every 
community where those powers are permitted to ex- 
pand by a suitable culture. Mind, in the abstract; 
has no distinction of sex ; and what is there to pre- 
vent the mental faculties of woman from reaching to the 
highest intellectual elevation, if they are directed with 
the same fervency of purpose and ardour of pursuit as 
have exalted the brightest names in our literature to 
those dignities which posterity has gratefully assigned 
to them ? In our own country, Mrs. Somerville may 
stand forth an illustrious example of the supremacy 
