Page:Indian Shipping, a history of the sea-borne trade and maritime activity of the Indians from the earliest times.djvu/21

 small compass, and is equal alike to the enumeration of details and the march and sweep of a rapid historical survey.

One characteristic cannot escape the most casual reader of this volume: Prof. Mookerji takes his materials as he finds them, and does not clip and pare them down, in the name of historical criticism, or handle them after the accredited methods of speculative chronology. By confining himself to settled landmarks, and traversing his ground by rapid strides, proceeding from epoch to epoch, he is able to avoid the quicksands of Indian chronology. As for the critical methods of sifting evidence, there is a great deal of misconception in the air, and it is best to point out that the methods which are imperative in testing an alleged fact or event are highly unsuitable in a review of the formative forces, agencies, movements, of a nation's history as preserved in the storehouse of national tradition. To take an example from the so-called Higher Criticism, to explode the Mosaic authorship is not to explode Moses in culture-history. In fact, whether in Semitic, Chinese, or Indian philology, the destructive (and explosive) criticism of the seventies and eighties of the last century is now itself exploded, and has been followed by a finer and more accurate sense of historic origins and national evolutions. For the rest, it must be recognized that, while accuracy and scientific criticism, in the measure in which they are