literally, for the word means "knowledge." It was applied, as the English students found out, sometimes to the sacred books of the ancient religion of India, and sometimes to the body of literature that had gathered around them in the course of time. Those books, four in number, were said by the Brâhmans to be a direct verbal revelation from the Most High, and were soon understood by the scholars to be the fountain-head of India's religion and law both. All their efforts were henceforth bent in this direction, but they could accomplish very little, even when they contrived to get hold of portions of the precious texts, as they met another and not less disheartening obstacle in the fact that the language proved to be an older form of Sanskrit, which it was as impossible for them to master unassisted as it would be for us to understand without previous study the Anglo-Saxon writings of Bede or Alfred the Great.

18. The second generation of Sanskrit workers fared better, because the more enlightened Brâhman Pundits began to drop some of their reserve and forget their apprehensions before their English pupils' earnestness and singlemindedness. It is not improbable that their patriotic feelings, too, may have been flattered, and their hopes aroused of better government at the hands of men who were striving so hard for knowledge of the people they were called on to rule. How, for instance, could such a man as Henry Thomas COLEBROOKE fail to command their respect and sympathy, when they saw him, a youth of scarcely twenty, resist the

temptations which beset him in the midst of the wealthy, pleasure-loving, and dissipated English official society, and take refuge in his midnight studies unaffected by the allurements of the gambling-table?1 Be it as it may, when Colebrooke, fifteen years after his arrival in India, after completing the compilation and translation of the Digest of Hindu Law begun by Sir William Jones, came out in the same year (1797) with a study of his ownEssays on the Religious Ceremonies of the Hindus,the work "showed very clearly that he had found excellent instructors, and had been initiated in the most sacred literature of the Brâhmans," even had he not explicitly testified in his writings that Brâhmans had proved by no means averse to instruct strangers, and that they did not even conceal from him the most sacred texts of the Veda.'

19. Sir William Jones, in founding the Bengal Asiatic Society, became the initiator of systematic and consecutive research in the newly opened quarry. His friend and fellow-laborer, Charles Wilkins, lived to be greeted in his native land, at the close of an unusually long and well-filled life, with the title of "Father of Sanskrit Studies." And well earned was the recognition, since he often had sacrificed the tastes which drew him to purely scholarly pursuits in his chosen field, in order to devote himself to the drudgery without which the establishment of the Society must have remained barren of practical

1 Colebrooke's Letters.

2 Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. iv., p. 371 (New York edition, Scribner, Armstrong, & Co., 1876).

results. It was he who organized the first Sanskrit printing office, with absolutely raw material in the shape of native printers and other workmen, who had to be, each individually, shown the very a-b-c of their craft. And not only that, but the type had to be designed and cast, so that Wilkins, in his own single person, was by turns, or all at one time, draughtsman, founder, compositor, type-setter, printer, and proof-reader. Yet these two men, great as were their merits, are regarded now, in the light of a century of marvellously successful work, rather as the precursors and prophets of a science of which Colebrooke is acknowledged the true messiah. For, if his predecessors opened, so to speak, the garden of Sanskrit belles-lettres, he it was who began that determined digging down amidst the roots and through the subsoil and stratified layers of words and facts which at length brought down the searchers to the very hard pan of positive knowledge. Religion, law, social institutions (especially that of caste), native sects, grammar, astronomy, arithmetic, and sciences generally, as known to the Hindus-in each of these provinces he showed the way and started the work mapped out for those who were to succeed him by some standard pieces of research, which, for skill and depth of treatment, have never been outdone, even if many of the positions he took up on the high-water line of the knowledge of his time, were naturally swamped by the advancing tide of science.

20. No province of Oriental research is as rich as the Sanskrit field, both in materials and in illustrious workers. Their name is legion; the mass of their

scholarly achievements, as piled on shelf upon shelf, in rows of more or less ponderous volumes, or scattered in loose essays and studies through numberless special periodicals in every European language, is such as to appal not only those that aspire to follow in their footsteps as original searchers, but even, if not still more, those who elect the more modest portion of popularizing their works, i. e., of making the world at large interested in and familiar with their aims, their methods, and the results attained so far, and who, in order to do this successfully and reliably, must master the greater portion of what has been done, keeping well up to date, as this is work that never pauses, and each day may bring forth a discovery or a point of view more important than the last. To give the names of even the most illustrious of this admirable host were a hopeless attempt, besides that mere names are always unprofitable. Many will turn up of themselves in the following pages, in connection with their work, and the bibliographical list appended to this volume, as to the preceding ones, will, it is hoped, in a great measure, supply the want of information on this subject.

I. WITH the vague and sweeping approximativeness with which we are wont to lump our knowledge or imaginings of all such things as are removed very far away from us in space or time, or both, we rather incline to think of "India" as one country, one nation. How ludicrously wide of the mark such a fancy is, has already been shown, and will appear repeatedly as we advance. Yet it is in so far excusable, that to the European mind, India is identified with one race-the Aryan; that her history is to us that of this race's vicissitudes on the Himâlayan continent, on which it has been supreme so long, materially and spiritually; that the history of Indian thought and speech is pre-eminently that of the Aryan mind, until even now, when races have become so inextricably mixed that there are no longer any Aryan peoples, but only Aryan languages and, perhaps, traits of intellect and character, we turn to India as one of the fountain-heads of Aryan life.

2. Not the fountain-head. For we know beyond