knowledge with which Europe is now blessed. These are the systems under the influence of which the people of India have become what they are. They have been weighed in the balance, and have been found wanting. To perpetuate them, is to perpetuate the degradation and misery of the people. Our duty is not to teach, but to unteach them, not to rivet the shackles which have for ages bound down the minds of our subjects, but to allow them to drop off by the lapse of time and the progress of events.
If we turn from Sanskrit and Arabic learning, and the state of society which has been formed by it, to western learning, and the improved and still rapidly improving condition of the western nations, what a different spectacle presents itself! Through the medium of England, India has been brought into the most intimate connection with this fa-
however defective Arabian learning may appear when viewed by the light of modern science, it would be doing great injustice to the Augustan age of the caliphs at Bagdad to compare it with the present æra of Mohammedan literature in India. The Indian Mohammedans are only bad imitators of an erroneous system. Arabic is studied at Calcutta as a difficult foreign language; original genius and research have long since died out, if they ever had any existence, among this class of literary people in India; and the astronomy of Ptolemy and the medicine of Galen are languidly transmitted by the dogmatic teachers of one generation to the patient disciples of the next.
