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PREFACE. 
It will be generally admitted that a work such as that announced, has 
been long called for, and that it will supply a desideratum in our Indian 
literature. The regular Transactions of the Asiatic Society appear in too 
bulky and expensive a shape to afford sufficient information to the 
European world of the state of Indian science, or to supply excitement 
to the labourers in the vineyard here. No one, who desires to draw the 
immediate attention of the literary or scientific world to the result of his 
enquiries or meditations, will choose as the vehicle of publication a volume 
which does not appear oftener than once in five or six years, while its 
bulk and price* are such as to restrict its purchase almost entirely to the 
possessors of large libraries. But the proposed work will be free from 
both these objections. Appearing regularly once a month, and at a price 
which is within the means of all, it w ill no doubt do much to foster the 
increasing taste of the public for useful enquiries, while under the 
proposed management there is little fear of its proving equally effective 
in raising the character of Indian science. 
If in this particular point of view, the work, of which the termination 
is now announced, appear defective, it must be recollected that the pre- 
sent Editor’s means were less, while his difficulties were greater, than 
those of the projectors of the new Journal; and above all, that his was a 
first attempt in a country where all first attempts are almost sure to fail. 
The proposed work will follow one which may be said in some measure 
to have succeeded, — it commands the exertions of a learned Society, and 
it is to be conducted by two gentlemen, whose names alone are warrants 
of success. But although it be sufficiently evident that the new work 
must aspire to higher pretensions than the present one, the Editor owes 
it to himself, as well as to his correspondents, to state that his views, 
in originally projecting the Gleanings, were such as to induce him to 
seek for and prefer elementary communications ; — and this so much 
so, that on a review of the whole work he is rather disposed to regret 
that such papers have not been more numerous, than to undervalue the 
work as being less recondite than might have been expected. It has 
always appeared to him that a great mistake is made, when science is 
assumed to be something so very abstruse as to be beyond the compre- 
hension of the common reader. To him it has always appeared that this 
character of difficulty, which has attached to science, is attributable to 
It is curious to observe the preference so generally given to the quarto form 
of publication by the members of our learned societies. Assuming that their pur- 
pose is to disseminate useful information, nothing can be more preposterous It is 
obvious, that for one purchaser of a bulky sprawling quarto in which “ a river of 
type meanders through a meadow of margin," there will be half a dozen of a com- 
modious octavo, and this without the very important advantage of a reduction of 
price amounting to one-lialf. 
