The Improvement of Indian Agriculture. 
857 
the noblest monument that could have been raised to a beloved 
Queen, honoured from the heart by dear children and by her people, 1 
and whose long and beneficent reign has been appreciably con- 
tributory to the marvellous expansion and prosperity of the great 
commercial Empire of Britain during the past sixty years. But for 
the serious students of national progress the year has been rendered 
equally remarkable by the publication of four notable works, of the 
highest utility and interest, on India ; these being Sir W. Wilson 
Hunter’s enlarged third edition of his Indian Empire, the three 
concluding volumes of Dr. George Watt’s monumental Dictionary 
of the Economic Products of India, Mr. J. A. Baines’s General Report 
on the Census of India, 1891, and Dr. John Augustus Yoelcker’s 
Report on the Improvement of Indian Agriculture. 
The first is a masterly and brilliantly-written summary of the 
political and administrative history of Ancient or Hindu, Mediaeval 
or Mahomedan, and Modern or British India, that is a record, at 
once condensed, accurate, comprehensive, and philosophical, of the 
past of India ; the second, an encyclopedic account of the nature 
and uses of every Indian mineral, vegetable, and animal production, 
crude or manufactured, known in the international trade of the 
world ; the third, a scientific, scholarly, and most fascinating 
exposition of the statistics of the whole present material and moral 
condition of India ; while the fourth, Dr. Yoelcker’s Report, is a 
revelation, as clear as such revelations can be made in the present, of 
the future of India ; of the incalculable development of wealth in 
agriculture, and the arts dependent on agriculture, that must take 
place in India through the operation of equal laws and the 
diffusion of technical education, secured by the continuance of the 
“ pax Britannica.” It is a most important and significant series of 
works on India to have appeared in one and the same year, and 
should be in the hands of not only every student of industry, com- 
merce, political economy, and history, but of every English states- 
man and publicist. 
The volumes enumerated, together with the Moral and 
Material Progress Report , published by the India Office every 
year, and the Statistical Abstract, published by the same office 
every quarter, provide all the information regarding India that need 
be required for ordinary manufacturing, mercantile, journalistic, 
and parliamentary purposes ; purely local details, topographical, 
economic, historical, statistical, and executive, being supplied by Sir W. 
Wilson Hunter’s Imperial Gazetteer of India and the Administrative 
Reports published every year by the various Local Governments 
and Native States in India. All these books ought to be placed in 
the free libraries and political clubs of every manufacturing and 
commercial centre in this country interested in the trade with the 
1 Homer, of Arete, Odyssey, vii. G9-71 : — 
Ketvq ire pi Krjpi tet iyrirai re /cal ecrriV 
( K te <pl\<Aiv iraiSuv, .... 
Kai Aa&y. 
