42 G. A. Grierson — Study of Indian Vernaculars in Europe. [No. 1, 
appear to have made the language of that country their own in a very 
special manner. The translations which I saw in Rome, were on a far 
higher grade of excellence, than those into many Indian languages which 
issued from the Serampore press more than fifty years afterwards. Fa- 
ther Antonio’s Bhagalpnri translation, however, could not he found, and 
there appears little doubt, but that it was destroyed in one of the distur- 
bances in Patna, when the local mission of the Roman church was burnt 
down by the ‘ barbari id est badmashi,’ as a quaint Latin chronicle 
which I was permitted to see at Patna described them. My inquiries at 
Rome, however, gave me the clues, by the help of which I have traced 
the information which follows, and which may be found interesting, as 
showing glimpses of the growth in Europe of the knowledge of Indian 
languages. 
In the early part of the eighteenth century, Maturin Vcyssiere La 
Croze was in charge of the royal library at Berlin. This remarkable 
scholar, a profound student in oriental lore, as it was then understood, 
carried on a copious correspondence with nearly every learned man 
of his time. This correspondence was published in 1742-46 at Leipzig 
by Uhl, in three closely printed Latin volumes of about three hundred 
pages each, under the name of the Thesaurus Epistolicus Lacrozianus, 
which is still obtainable in old bookshops. I do not know a more en- 
tertaining book than this collection of letters on many subjects. The 
Latin is throughout easy, and the manner in which the various subjects 
are treated compels the reader’s admiration for the learning and 
ingenuity displayed, while now and then some pit-fall of error 1 into 
which the wisest has fallen, warns students of the present day to avoid 
generalizations till we have made fast and firm the data on which wo 
base them. 
In the year 1714 we find David Wilkins writing to La Croze from 
Amsterdam, asking him for assistance in compiling a collection of trans- 
lations of the Lord’s Prayer 8 into as many languages as possible, which 
Wilkins was publishing in conjunction with John Chamberlayno of 
London. Amongst other languages mentioned, Wilkins 3 specially states 
a Capuchin, one of whose successors, Father Pinna, wrote a Catechism in Urdu, which, 
he dedicated to the Rajah of Betia. Father Pinna died in Patna in 1747. 
1 E. g., when La Croze maintains that all languages are derived from Hebrew 
and cites the Marathi alphabet in proof thereof (Th. E. La C., Ill, 65'. 
8 Mott had published a similar collection in London fourteen years previously, 
and Chamborlayne’s ‘ Orationum dominicarum sylloge’ was a revised and enlarged 
edition of this. 
3 Loc. Cit. I, 369, 1 alphabeta Singaloeum, Jauanicum, et Bengalieum ’ The 
Bangali version is quite unintelligible. It is reprinted in the Sprachmeister, v. post. 
