Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/463

 India and for the introduction of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories." Such was the general apathy on the subject amongst Indian administrations, that nothing was done, nothing attempted, till ten years had expired. At the end of that time a General Committee of Public instruction was formed in Calcutta, whose first step in the direction of progress — as they supposed it to be — was the establishment of a Sanskrit College in that city, in addition to the Sanskrit College established thirty years previously at Benares. That enlightened Brahman,, vigorously protested, pointing out that it was "English literature and science" that the people, when left to themselves, desired for their sons, as was manifested in the foundation, by the zemindars and merchants of Bengal, of the Hindu College of Calcutta for such pursuits in the year 1816. To Sanskrit literature and its more diligent cultivation. Ram Mohan Roy, himself an eminent scholar and the translator into English of the Upanishads or speculative portion of the Vedas, was willing to give every reasonable encouragement, but if the improvement of the native population was the object of the Government, let it promote, he entreated, a more liberal and enlightened system of education.

What a Government College was in those days the journal of Bishop at Benares in the same year shall tell us:—

"The Vidyalaya is divided into a number of classes, who learn reading, writing, and arithmetic (in the Hindu manner), Persian, Hindu Law and sacred literature, Sanskrit, astronomy according to the Ptolemaic system and astrology! There are 200 scholars; the astronomical lecturer produced a terrestrial globe, divided according to their system and elevated to the meridian of Benares. Mount Meru he identified with the North Pole, and under the Southern Pole he supposed the tortoise to stand on which the earth rests. The southern hemisphere he apprehended to be uninhabitable; but on the concave surface in the interior of the globe he placed Patalam or hell. He then shewed me how the sun went round the earth once every day and how by a different but equally continuous motion he visited the signs of the zodiac."

Well—yet another ten years drag on, and the question is still undecided whether the people of India, whose mother-tongues are generally poor and rude, should have the means of pursuing higher studies by acquiring the Arabic and Sanskrit languages or the English. In 1835 that question was settled as it now stands, by the advocacy of one, who, having already