Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/207

 proper line, and that they can never hope to attain the success in farther life, which ought to be the aspiration and the reasonable expectation of those who enter upon a learned or professional career. But I think all that may very well be left to the arrangement of fortune, or rather of Providence, and that if a young lady feels a special call for learning as her vocation she ought no more to be excluded from learning than she is excluded from the career of music or painting. And if any of my own rougher sex are inclined to feel jealous, which I trust very few are in this community, one may point to the fact that it is only ladies of very special gifts who have achieved the first distinction either in painting or music, and still fewer perhaps in the kindred art of sculpture. But beyond that, here in India there is an absolute want of learned ladies, and in the pursuits especially of medicine and teaching, there is an ample field for far more than any number of lady graduates that we are likely to have for many years, and perhaps even for generations to come. We may all, therefore, congratulate this lady on having entered upon a career in which I trust she will be successful, and will have many followers equally successful, and lending lustre to the University from which they have proceeded.

There is another point in the results of our examinations which is of very great interest. You will have been struck by the recurrence of Mussulman names in the list of gentlemen who have this year taken prizes. It is only a few years ago that the idea was very prevalent that the Mussulmans in this country had for ever abandoned the pursuit of learning, that they had given it up to the Hindus, and that if ever they were to come to the front again, it must be by physical force and fighting. There were, however, some in those days, who like myself, refused to believe that this was to be the course of events which Providence had chalked out for the future of this country. We refused to believe that the Mussulman intellect was in any way essentially inferior to the Hindu or the European intellect, and looking to what Arabian scholars had done in the centuries which followed the ages of darkness, we thought that there was nothing either in the Mahomedan religion, or Mahomedan character, which ought in any way to check their progress in learning. Three or four years ago, you will remember, that a very considerable impulse was given to Mahomedan education, and like all stirrings of the human mind, the waves of this educational movement spread themselves far beyond the immediate point to which the impulse was directed, and now we see this year a