Page:Convocation Addresses of the Universities of Bombay and Madras.djvu/505

 its material facts. I will not believe for a moment that they have. It is, indeed, perfectly manifest that they have not. "The fields are white to the harvest." I will take only a few subjects, and first there is Ethnology. Are yon Dravidians autochthones? Very certainly you have much more reason to call yourselves so, than any Greek ever had, but are you? and, if not, how otherwise? There is a great amount of knowledge concerning you, collected in Dr. Macleane's most remarkable Manual of the Administration of the Presidency—a book so valuable, that it is a gratification to me to think that its composition synchronized with my term of office in this country, but, again and again, the cables break off short. If any one can pick up those cables from the bottom of the sea of oblivion, surely it should be one of yourselves.

The Aryans of the West, by close study of the sacred languages of the Aryans of the East, have learned, not only a great deal about their own early history, but have been able to tell the Aryans of the East almost everything that these last know about their own history.

Why should not you, Dravidians, after learning the scientific methods of the West, apply them to your own languages ? Study your own languages comparatively, as Bishop Caldwell advised you years ago. He was a wise man who said: "There is perhaps more to be learned from human language than from anything that has been written in it."

Why again, if we want some one to decipher your own inscriptions, must we send thousands and thousands of miles away, and hunt up some scholar in the valley of the Danube ?

Then there is the question of the characters which you use in writing. Are you sure that you are giving your vernaculars a fair chance, supposing that is, you intend to retain them, as I presume you do ? Languages which have a frightfully difficult character, and one which is exceptionally expensive to print, are at a great disadvantage in the battle of life.

I suppose there is no insuperable difficulty in simplifying your characters. The Jesuits used, three hundred years ago, a form of Roman character for writing Concany, but now-a-days, these are changes which, if they are made at all, must be made by the people most concerned.

And if you do not take the lead, who will?