Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume I.).djvu/514

390 tary victims a little further down the river; nor indeed when a man has come several hundred miles to die, is it likely that a police-officer can prevent him. Instruction seems the only way in which these poor people can be improved, and that, I trust, they will by degrees obtain from us.

The Vidalaya is a large building divided into two courts galleried above and below, and full of teachers and scholars, divided into a number of classes, who learn reading, writing, arithmetic (in the Hindoo manner,) Persian, Hindoo law, and sacred literature, Sanscrit, astronomy according to the Ptolemaic system, and astrology! There are 200 scholars, some of whom of all sorts came to say their lessons to me, though, unhappily, I was myself able to profit by none, except the astronomy, and a little of the Persian. 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 “chukwa” to stand, on which the earth rests. The southern hemisphere he apprehended to be uninhabitable, but on its concave surface, in the interior of the globe, he placed Padalon. He then shewed me how the sun went round the earth once in every day, and how, by a different but equally continuous motion, he also visited the signs of the zodiac. The whole system is precisely that of Ptolemy, and the contrast was very striking between the rubbish which these young men were learning in a Government esta-