powers or emoluments are to be conferred on the police, if a toll bar is to be established on a line of road which is not laid down, or at rivers yet unbridged, if widows are to re-marry, or converts to the Christian religion are not to lose every farthing they have in the world, opinions must be called for from the magistrate, the commissioner, the collector, or the judge. This at first sight promises well enough, as tending in the direction of representative Government, and as putting the chief executive or legislative authorities in possession of the feelings of important sections of the population as regards the measure under discussion, without which no prudent Governor or Council would venture to legislate or to act. For, it is through the head of an office or of a district, or of a division, that the opinions of castes and tribes, or artizans, or landholders, may find a legitimate vent. And it must be a wrong system where some regard is not paid to the prejudices or predilections of the majority. But the mistake often is that in the indiscriminate call for opinions, the opinions of those best qualified have not been got at. For instance, it is proposed to amend the laws under which either arrears of revenue, or arrears of rent, are at present levied. A circular is despatched by the Government to the Board of Revenue, by the Revenue Board to the Commissioner, and by the Commissioner to every officer in charge of a Collectorate. There is, usually, no attempt at selection. Every man in charge of a treasury must be supposed capable of giving an opinion on the merits of the new law, and no man not so in charge, can be supposed to know any thing about it. But it may happen that the best commissioner has lately been presented to the Sudder Court, and that a collector has been sent to a zillah judgeship, while two or three of the officers entrusted with the revenue are either assistants holding office temporarily, or magistrates lately changed from police and judicial business. Thus, the ripe experience of years in a particular department or division may be lost to the State, and in its place, with one or two carefully considered opinions, we may get a host of crude and hasty productions, diversified by pleas of inexperience, or inability, or want of time. This would be remedied, if instead of circulars issued to all officers indiscriminately, we had circulars issued to particular individuals selected for their past experience or general aptitude for discussion, whatever employment they might happen to be filling at the time. This plan of selecting men to give opinions, would still further act as a wholesome stimulus to professional ambition. At present, many men think circulars, simply to be a bore. They lead to nothing tangible or direct. A hasty, slovenly, ill-considered opinion, shorn of publicity, brings no discredit. The most elaborate and

logical disquisition may convey no reward or encouragement, or may be lost in the crowd of its bad and unworthy companions. We do not say that this has always been the case, and we know that the contrary plan has been pursued in some instances with remarkable success; but what we always lament over is the chance of a multiplicity of answers, which are not in point, and which afford no help towards a right decision. In the case of the Glossary, however, we do not forget that promiscuous reference to almost every officer in every district was supposed indispensable for the attainment of departmental, rural, or local terms. Every one was invited to give the result of his experience in settlement, in the detection of crime, in shooting and hunting, or in whatever had brought him in immediate personal contact with artizans, fishermen or ryots. The consequence of this was that some men, who had a fund of curious information as to their profession, had not the time, or did not know how to display it to advantage : others asked a few questions of their native subordinates, and put down the answers at random, as fast as given; some gravely took down a dictionary, and supplied the blanks in the glossary therefrom, thus attempting to recruit the later, more copious, and more extensive from the drier and earlier work: others supplied Mr. Wilson with every thing, which he had at his disposal: many made fearful havock of oriental orthography, and many quietly returned the glossary, in precisely the same state as it had reached their busy and unwilling hands. It strikes us that to collect local terms and usages for the end in contemplation, the following plan would have been attended with a good practical result. In every district, or certainly in every division, there are one or more officials, who, whether they be philologists or not, are endowed with considerable energy, which they are willing to devote to any object, apart from their secular duties, by which the public service is to be benefitted. Let such a man be selected, and informed that it is the special desire of Government that a list of peculiar customs, rustic phrases, and agricultural terms, not to be found in ordinary dictionaries, prevalent within a certain area, should be made up within a given time: let such a person be empowered to employ such natives or European subordinates as he may think qualified to record what they already know of such sub-divisions of the task, as their avocations may have made familiar to them: let such a man further, of his own accord, impress on such a subordinate, the importance of the duty, by personal conference or demi-official correspondence, to the exclusion of formal and annoying circulars: let him show that his heart is in the business, and we will venture to say that a mass of quaint and curious inDEC., 1857.

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formation might be soon collected together, which in the hands of a scholar, like Mr. Wilson, would have been turned to practical good effect. Had, we say, such men as Mr. Mills, when in Cuttack, or Mr. Ricketts when in Chittagong, and others, been applied to after the above fashion, it is probable that a page or two of lamentation as to want of "the public zeal and philological proficiency of the East India Company's Civil Service," would have been omitted from the preface to the Glossary.

Bereft of support from the living in India, the compiler turned to the records of the dead, or to the written labours of men still at work in England; and those who know anything about dictionaries or glossaries, may readily conceive that it was no easy task to consult all the "selections" and "analyses” and "vocabularies:" all the "digests," "reports," "cases," "circulars," and "transactions," and "travels," which in the last half century have been printed by enquiring individuals, literary societies, and philanthropic Governments. Still, this labour was more or less carefully encountered and gone through, and a well deserved compliment is paid to the late Sir H. M. Elliot, for the work in which, under the modest designation of a supplemental Glossary,' that able, lamented, and accomplished scholar had contrived to collect an immense mass of information relative to the tribes and castes, to the agricultural and commercial customs of nearly all Upper India, extending from Oude or Rohilcund on one scale, to Saugor and Jubbulpore on the other: the whole digested and arranged with the greatest order and lucidity, and set off by erudition devoid of pedantry, drawn from the resources of an intellect to which the classics, the learned tongues of India, the repositories of Hindu and Mahommedan literature, the tongues of Schiller, Dante, and Bossuet, and the vernaculars of the people with whom his official lot had been cast, were all equally familiar. The work in question unfortunately embraces only half the alphabet, and is now completely out of print; not only in Calcutta, but even at Agra before that city was sacked and burnt. We have heard something of a mass of materials which Sir H. Elliot had collected with a view to its completion, and we should be glad to think that, if this be the case, his executors would know how to make use of such a legacy; but in any case we trust, that in more settled times the Government of Agra, or the Supreme Government, will think fit to order a reprint of the glossary as it stands. No book can well be more useful, or more attractive, to an assistant set to work at his first station. And after the storm which has swept over the Upper Provinces, carrying destruction in its train, there is no saying what practical hints may not be forth

coming, to supply gaps and deficiencies, from the volume in question. A reprint will, moreover, be a graceful tribute to the memory of a public servant, who, if excelled by others in statesmanship, in the science of governing aliens, and in broad and comprehensive measures, was excelled by none in the combination of extensive and profound learning with great official ability.

With these remarks we now come to the glossary itself, and we feel that in such a review the fairest thing to the author is to endeavour to shew how he has dealt with some words of universal acceptation all over India, as well as with some of those peculiarities known to exist on this side of the Peninsula, with which a reviewer, dwelling by the Ganges, may be supposed to have some acquaintance. Southern and western India, with their eight or ten languages between them, we gladly leave to the praise or blame of men competent to the task.

Those who are acquainted with Mr. Wilson's literary predilections, and official career, will naturally expect to find a flood of copious and exact information on all points relating to the literature, and the religious and social observances, of the Hindu; and in this, they will not be disappointed. Most of the castes and the ceremonies, the dark or bright days of the calendar, the offerings of rice to deceased ancestors, the life of the Hindu from the birth to the marriage and the funeral torch, are all to be found clearly set forth in their appointed places. Mr. Wilson's connection with the mint at Calcutta may be traced in his explanation of the word rupee. A very brief explanation of this familiar term would be disappointing, whereas, on the other hand, it would be endless to enumerate all the varieties of the rupee that were ever known, and wrong to turn a glossary into a work on coins. For instance, there were sixty-four kinds of rupees current in the Punjab alone, when we occupied that country. The glossary takes a middle course between abruptness or total omission and prolixity, and gives us two columns and a half, on the origin, weight, standard, and purity of the coin.*

It is the nature of a glossary to be discursive, and with the privilege of a reviewer on such a subject, we cannot help remarking on the omission to designate the two shilling coin struck some years ago in England, by this obvious title. By keeping the superscription and the standard different, there would have been no fear of interference with the rules of exchange or of confusion in the money market. But from our German connections, it was thought necessary to coin a very unsightly looking article, and to designate it by a continental name. This utter forgetfulness of India is exactly what happens in every other instance, when India, not mutinous, nor at war, nor made a party question, may be intimately concerned. The English rupee would have constantly reminded the nation of that splendid prize which had been won by so much blood and valour, aided by such signal good fortune, and consolidated by so much statesmanship and administrative talent. Neither France nor Russia, we think, would have

We pursue the glossary, and the task proposed to ourselves, which is, as we have said, mainly that of showing how Mr. Wilson has treated some familiar terms which required a precise definition, and of supplying such additional information as chance, or local research, or knowledge of the practice of one department or another, may have placed at our command.

We commence with the first letter of the alphabet, and with the very common word adawlut, which so many have to do with, in some shape or other, and which nearly every one desires to see improved. The distribution of the courts under the Mahommedan and the Company's Governments are given with correctness, but one peculiarity about the use of this term was evidently unknown to the compiler, which is as follows: The word adalat or adawlut signifies a court of justice of any kind, but in the mouths, not only of officials and native lawyers, but of villagers and tradesmen, it is exclusively restricted to designate the civil court. To the agriculturist, the moonsiff, the sudder ameen and the civil judge, hold an adawlut. But the term is never applied familiarly to the courts, either of the magistrate, or the collector. It is precisely in these points that the learned compiler, whose time in India was divided between the learning of Benares and the civilisation of Calcutta, very often fails.

The word ail, or a-eel, from the same cause, seems to us not given with force and distinctness sufficient. It is said to be a bank or mound of earth, forming a division between fields, a boundary mark, an embankment. Now, the fact is that these marks or boundaries, which may often be counted by hundreds and scores in any plain within two or three hundred miles of Calcutta, do not often arrive at the dignity of a mound or of an embankment. Now and then, we may have an ail which, with three or four different turns and twists, leads right across the rice field from one village to another, at the height of two feet,

acted in this way towards their "brightest gem." Nor again, to pursue the topic of English apathy a little farther, do we think that there is one single European nation that would take the trouble to build a sparkling fairy edifice to comprise all that was most attractive in statuary and in architecture all over the universe, and not reserve one small court, one single gallery, one limited niche, for copies of the luxuriant tracery of Hindu temples, of the gigantic structures of rock-caves, or towering pagodas, or for the exquisite creations of imperial Agra and Delhi, which were destined for the devotion of the multitude, or to cover the relics of kings and queens. Is there, we ask, one other nation in Europe, however benighted, groaning under despotism or convulsed by civil factions, in whose Crystal Palace there would not have been an Indian court with a fac-simile of the tomb of Akbar, of the Kutub Minar, the highest pillar in the world, and of the unrivalled Taj Mehal, to which the altar in the Or San Michele at Florence is as copper to refined gold? So much for our boasted taste, our liberality of thought and sentiment, and our world-wide research!