Page:Narrative of a journey through the upper provinces of India etc. (Volume III.).djvu/400

358 to excluding all moral instruction from their schools, the Hindu sacred writings having nothing of the kind, and, if they had, being shut up from the majority of the people by the double fence of a dead language, and an actual prohibition to read them, as too holy for common eyes or ears. The defects of the latter will appear when I have told you that the actual state of Hindu and Mussulman literature, mutatis mutandis, very nearly resembles what the literature of Europe was before the time of Galileo, Copernicus, and Bacon. The Mussulmans take their logic from Aristotle, filtered through many successive translations and commentaries, and their metaphysical system is professedly derived from Plato, (“Filatoun”). The Hindus have systems not very dissimilar from these, though, I am told, of greater length and more intricacy; but the studies in which they spend most of their time are the acquisition of the Sanskrit, and the endless refinements of its grammar, prosody, and poetry. Both have the same natural philosophy, which is also that of Aristotle in zoology and botany, and Ptolemy in astronomy, for which the Hindus have forsaken their more ancient notions of the seven seas, the six earths, and the flat base of Padalon, supported on the back of a tortoise. By the science which they now possess they are some of them able to foretell an eclipse, or compose an almanac; and many of them derive some little pecuniary advantage from pretensions to judicial astrology. In medicine and chemistry they are just sufficiently advanced to talk of sub-