valuable. This was the thought which presented itself to me when I discovered, almost accidentally, while looking through the French MS. in the Madras Government's records, that the good Abbé had never had justice done to him. Accordingly, with the permission and with the aid of the Madras Government, I have made a verbatim translation of the work in its complete form which I here present to the public, together with such notes and observations as seem necessary to put the text into line with later developments and research.
As to the intrinsic value of the Abbé's work, I have no hesitation in saying that it is as valuable to-day as ever it was, even more valuable in some respects. It is true that a mass of learned literature on the religious and civil life of the Hindus has accumulated since the Abbe's days, and it is still accumulating; and the impression may be felt in many minds that a book written so long ago can be of little practical use at present; but the fact is that the Abbé's work, composed as it was in the midst of the people themselves, is of a unique character, for it combines, as no other work on the Hindus combines, a recital of the broad facts of Hindu religion and Hindu sociology with many masterly descriptions, at once comprehensive and minute, of the vie intime of the people among whom he lived for so many years. With any other people than the Hindus such a work would soon grow out of date; but with them the same ancestral traditions and customs are followed nowadays that were followed hundreds of years ago, at least by the vast majority of the population. I do not deny that some of the Abbé's statements require to be modified in the light of changes that have taken place amongst the educated classes since the introduction of Western learning, but such necessary modifications, which, as remarked above, I have introduced in the form of notes, are surprisingly few. Enumerated
