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A Retrospect and a Prospect.

t was in the year 1856, now 73 years ago, that Dr. Caldwell, inspired by the missionary zeal that characterized many of the pioneers of Christian endeavour in India, brought out his first edition of “A comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian family of Languages,” "The publication was unique of its kind and epoch-making in the field of philological research in India. Contemporaneously with him and even before, missionaries had taken to the study of individual South Indian languages and evinced such loving interest in them that their labours stand to the present day as models of patient and persevering evangelical enterprise. Their interest was, no doubt, in the beginning brought about by the immediate necessity of carrying the gospel of Christ