Page:On the education of the people of India (IA oneducationofpeo00trevrich).pdf/73

But in Oxford we have never been guilty (since a better system was known in the world at large) of teaching the physics of Aristotle, however we may have paid an excessive attention to his metaphysics and dialectics.

“In Benares, however, I found in the institution supported by Government a professor lecturing on astronomy after the system of Ptolemy and Albunazar, while one of the most forward boys was at the pains of casting my horoscope; and the majority of the school were toiling at Sanskrit grammar. And yet the day before, in the same holy city, I had visited another college, founded lately by a wealthy Hindu banker, and entrusted by him to the management of the Church Missionary Society, in which, besides a grammatical knowledge of the Hindusthanee language, as well as Persian and Arabic, the senior boys could pass a good examination in English grammar, in Hume’s History of England, Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, the use of the globes, and the principal facts and moral precepts of the Gospel, most of them writing beautifully in the Persian and very tolerably in the English character, and excelling most boys I have met with in the accuracy and readiness of their arithmetic. * * * Ram Mohan Roy, a learned native,

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