Page:Calcutta Review Vol. II (Oct. - Dec. 1844).pdf/342

Rh becomes himself polluted; and, until he bathes, no one can touch or seize him, without being polluted too. A temporary impunity is thus secured. At other times, the boy finds his way to filthy and unclean places, where he remains for hours, or a whole day, defying the master and his emissaries to touch him, knowing full well that they cannot do so, without partaking of his own contracted pollution. So determined are boys to evade the torturous system of discipline, that, in making good their escape, they often wade or swim through tanks, or along the current of running drains, with a large earthen-pot over their head, so that the suspicion of passers by, or of those in pursuit, is not even excited, seeing that nought appears on the surface but a floating pot; or, they run off, and climb into the loftiest neighbouring tree, where they laugh to scorn the efforts of their assailants to dislodge them. In the recent case of one personally known to our informant, the runaway actually remained for three days on the top of a cocoa-nut tree, vigorously hurling the cocoa-nuts, as missiles, at the heads of all who attempted to ascend for the purpose of securing him.

Not sufficiently adverting to the deleterious influence of the substantive instruction communicated, and apparently overlooking altogether the noxious system of discipline, Mr. Adam was led to view those vernacular schools in a more favourable light than their intrinsic merits or rather demerits warrant. Regarding them chiefly as instruments for simply teaching reading, writing, and accounts, he was disposed to view them as negatively defective rather than positively vicious. But, even under this aspect of the case, he could not help penning the following delineation and verdict:—

“No one will deny that a knowledge of Bengali writing, and of native accounts, is requisite to natives of Bengal, but when these are made the substance and sum of proper instruction and knowledge, the popular mind is necessarily cabined, cribbed, and confined, within the smallest possible range of ideas, and those of the most limited local and temporary interest, and it fails even to acquire those habits of accuracy and precision which the exclusive devotion to forms of calculation might seem fitted to produce. What is wanted is something to awaken and expand the mind, to unshackle it from the trammels of mere usage, and to teach it to employ its own powers; and for such purposes, the introduction into the system of common instruction of some branch of knowledge, in itself perfectly useless (if such a one could be found), would at least rouse and interest by its novelty, and in this way be of some benefit. Of course the benefit would be much greater if the supposed new branch of knowledge were of a useful tendency, stimulating the mind to the increased observation and comparison of external objects, and throwing it back upon itself with a larger stock of materials for thought. A higher intellectual cultivation, however, is not all that is required, That, to be beneficial to the individual and to society, must be