era of progress after the Revolution, are the great works of construction and organisation, implying both a high degree of mechanical skill and the command of vast masses of capital and labourmechanical science, inventive and constructive skill, and the organisation of large businesses and bodies of men. Side by side with this material development is to be noticed the effort to secure more equal and humane treatment for and greater social union among all.

"

In the seventeenth century, the physical properties of matter, in the eighteenth, chemical discoveries and classification, and in the nineteenth, biology, formed the principal subjects of investigation in the field of science. Darwin's theory is the dominating influence in all the sciences of life. "In face of the most recent marvels, the electron in physics, the aeroplane in engineering, the idea of evolution, as applied to life at large, is still seen to be the weightiest fact which the last century of science has thrown into the scales of philosophy and progress." for a time there was a danger that human progress itself might be explained by a law of struggle such as Darwin postulated for the survival of the fittest....... But with mankind the higher law prevails, of development by cooperation.' (See Prince Kropotkin's book on the subject ). Two leading ideas which mark the age are the ideas of unity and of growth. Darwin's law becomes itself another and a potent link in the unification of mankind and gives us an objective unity amongst things outside us which were before regarded as separate beings. "Since the Origin of Species, the two most prominent moments in the history of science have been, first, the analysis of sidereal light by the spectrum with all its consequences, and second, the revolution in our ideas of matter by the new discoveries in electricity of quite recent years. Each case illustrates, as did the law of biological evolution, the essential quality of science in bringing together things previously thought unconnected, in shaking our mental composure with the ultimate result of inducing a more profound and intimate unity. To this power we owe the two correlated contemporary facts, a vast and unprecedented increase in the volume of knowledge, and a growing harmony and simplicity in its arrangement."

The researches of Dr. J. C. Bose have tended to make this unity more manifest, and illustrate the truth of the Vedic precept which he has accepted as his motto, 'That which exists is One, sages call him differently.'

and

have taken their place as the first genera! solicitude of all civilised societies. "The New world has taught us much, encouraged us still more. It has made the Atlantic for the modern world what the Mediterranean was to the ancients. But it has not yet become the general centre of civilised life. That remains, so far as it can be said to exist at all in a world so closely knit, on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and in the midst of the French, Teutonic and English-speaking peoples. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the French and the English filled a larger space on the stage, and their names would each exceed those of the Germans on the roll of the great. But from the latter half of the eighteenth century; the part of Germany grows; and if the nineteenth is the age of steady progress, of profound research and wide speculation, hers will be the leading name."

Finally, we may quote the following passage from the opening remarks of the Appendix of Books, for the benefit of Indian readers nurtured solely on English literature. Referring to books which aim at giving a synthetic point of view, looking at all sides of their subject and seeing it in relation to men's evolution as a whole, the author says:

"In seeking books of this sort, we must turn to France and Germany, especially the former. To read easily the languages of the other two members of the real triple alliance of culture is increasingly useful for us. . . In respect of synthetic books on history, both nations long anticipated us; and the French have acquired a special talent, unmatched in the world, for clear and attractive exposition of complicated matters."

of

We have finished our summary the main characteristics of the growth of civilisation as sketched the by author, and shall now offer a word or two of criticism. Throughout the book, it seems to us, too great an insistence is laid on the scientific aspect of civilisation. Religion is barely touched upon here and there, and only as a factor of social evolution, and as an unifying and static force. The supremacy of the mind is not sufficiently emphasised, and the spiritual, as apart from the merely philanthropic or social, side of life is practically

could possibly be recouped by conquest or indemnity. The nations now arm to the teeth, but purely as a defensive measure. As a matter of fact, side by side with the growth of science, which is also the basis of the material prosperity and unification of the world, has come a steady deepening of human sympathy, and the extension of it to all weak and suffering things.

Compare the influence of Buddhism in Ancient India in this respect. of care and love Eor instance, the

children

understand the special features of the Middle Ages we must approach them from the side of religion, and yet, after this illuminating observation, the actual and concrete question which he propounds is disappointing in the extreme: "How far and in what ways," asks the author, "did this new order work to strengthen the collective force of mankind in its task of subduing the powers of nature and turning them ultimately to the common good?" "The growth of science is by no means the

whole of civilization, but it holds a commanding position in it," says Mr. Marvin in another place. But the impression left in the mind of the reader after a perusal of the book is that the scientific aspect of civilisation is the only aspect worth study.

A record of man's past achievementsachievements which were the essential pre-requisites of his later successes-would be altogether unintelligible and incomplete without a reference to India and the East generally, and here in this volume we find appreciative references to the algebra and the arithmetical notation, 'the little, all important device of the cipher' of the Hindus, and to the indebtedness of the Greeks to the Egyptians, Babylonians and Chaldeans. in geometry, astronomy, mensuration, medicine, and the art of writing.

"... the Greeks... did not appear as leaders until they had. . . met the more advanced peoples of the East, and had learnt what they had to teach. For in their wander-years they were as far behind Egyptians, Babylonians or Phoenicians in culture or achievements as were the northern barbarians on the fringe of the Roman Empire.”

Referring to the first theorem in geometry, the author says,

"it was a momentous step, one of the great turning points in history, and due entirely, so far as our knowledge goes, to the contact of the new, vigorous, and inquiring spirit of the Greeks with the old learning and art of the settled communities of the East, especially of Egypt."

The achievements of the Moors in Spain are thus spoken of:

"But the most vigorous intellectual life in the West, until the thirteenth century, was undoubtedly that sustained by the Mahomedan power in Spain, which cultivated all the arts and sciences, and restored to Europe something of the Greek philosophy which it had forgotten. To the Arabs of that period we owe not only several advances in mathematics and medicine, but the knowledge of Aristotle. . . But towards the close of the Middle Ages . . . two great movements had taken place which did much to... further study and bolder thinking. These were the Crusades and the Universities. Each in a different way laid Europe under a debt to the East, the universities for a large part of their science, the crusades for a large part of their chivalry In the world revealed by travel visitors to the East discovered other views of religion than their own, but consistent both with a civilised life and a high standard of thought and morality."

...

arouse

Only the barest allusion is made to the spiritual culture of the Hindus, and their superiority to the West in this respect, to be followed immediately after by a truimphant pæan in honour of Western science and the material achievements of the West.

"All that we learn of the Eastern mind, and the newest philosophies of our own, combine to show us the limitations of the Western, scientific, outlook and to suggest the sides on which it can be deepened and extended. But the Western mind dominates the world. It has built up the fabric of science and invention which is justified by success."

Mr. Marvin offers the following justification for confining his attention to the civilisations of Mesopotamia and Egypt among the ancient civilisations of the world:

"In thus limiting our view we are in no sense belittling the achievements of other races in other regions. In many points, more perhaps than we are yet aware of, the East contributed to Mediterranean culture: in some ways we have still to learn and to assimilate its spirit. But the Mediterranean current has conquered and pervades the world. . .”

Nay, everywhere the author refers to European civilisation and its direct progenitor, the Greco-Roman culture, in a way which betrays an overweening contempt for and the utmost ignorance of the mighty civilisations of the East, particularly of India.

now

"History is an account of man's achievements and in particular of the achievements of the Western leading branch of the human family which dominates the globe." "Western Europe, the old nursery of the highest civilisation of the globe." "Not till they (the Greeks) appeared, the chief moving factor in the Mediterranean world, could that sharp line be said to exist between the progressive and the backward, the civilised and the barbarian, which has divided the world ever since."

How thoroughly mistaken these conceited views, which would ignore every other civilisation except that which sprang up round the Mediterranean, mostly are, will be shown presently. Referring to the theory of Evolution, Mr. Marvin says:

"Earlier thinkers, from the Greeks onwards, had partial and fleeting glimpses of this conception."

It will no doubt be a surprise to the author of this confident assertion that the doctrine of Evolution was enunciated by Kapila in India long before the Christian Sir Monier Williams says:

era.

"Indeed if I may be allowed the anachronism, the Hindus were Spinozites more than 2,000 years before the existence of Spinoza ; and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin; and Evolutionists many centuries before the Doctrine of Evolution had been accepted by the scientists of our time and before any word like Evolution existed in any language of the world."

Even Huxley, whom Mr. Marvin cannot possibly ignore, says

"To say nothing of Indian sages to whom Evolution was a familiar notion ages before Paul of Tarsus was born. (Science and Hebrew Tradition).”

The immense superiority of the West to the East in science and industry and material progress from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards is patent and cannot be ignored; but up to that time India was not behind the West in industrial and scientific achievements, and apart from the grand systems of Indian philosophy to which no allusion is made in this history of the development of the human intellect, we have only to quote a passage like the following from the book under review'the ferocity of our criminal law which up to 1832 was still hanging persons, even youths of fifteen, for thefts of over five shillings in value'-and refer to the prevalence of lynch-law in the United States, and to the atrocities perpetrated in the Congo 'Free' State and during the Boxer 'rebellion' in China and to the more recent massacre of the Turks in Bulgaria, and note the absence of any international conscience in dealing with the non-White races of the world, in order to perceive that in ethical and spiritual development European civilisation is still in its infancy, and has much-very much indeed-to learn from the East.

The whole attitude of the learned author towards India is so typical of the disposition of western scholars to ignore the vast debt of the West to this ancient land of ours, that we intend before concluding to deal at some length with the subject. Draper in his History of Intellectual Development of Europe makes a similar complaint in respect of the contribution of the Arabs to western culture.

"I have to deplore the systematic manner in which the literature of Europe has contrived to put out of sight our scientific obligations to the Mahomedans. Surely they cannot much longer be hidden. Injustice founded on religious rancour and national conceit cannot be perpetuated for ever."

"It is curious to reflect," says Dr. P. C. Ray, in his History of Hindu Chemistry,

"that the upholders of 'Greek culture' are often found ready, though unconsciously, to twist and torture facts and conclusions to serve their own purpose, and reserve to themselves the benefit of doubt as regards date; but whenever the priority of the Hindus is unquestionable, an appeal is made to the theory of common origin and independent parallelism of growth. These scholars seem to smart under a sense of injury if they have to confess that Europe owes an intellectual debt to India; hence many a futile attempt to explain away positive historical facts."

"In some respects, and particularly in respect to the greatest things," says Max Muller in Auld Lang Syne,

"India has as much to teach us as Greece and Rome, nay, I should say more. We must not forget, of course, that we are the direct intellectual heirs of the Greeks and that our philosophical currency is taken from the capital left to us by them. Our palates are accustomed to the food which they have supplied to us from our very childhood, and hence whatever comes to us from the thought-mines of India is generally put aside as merely curious or strange, whether in language, mythology, religion or philosophy."

"It is idle to deny Pre-Buddhistic Indian art," says Okakura, himself a Buddhist, in his Ideals of the East,

"ascribing its sudden birth to the influence of the Greeks, as European archaeologists are wont to do. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana contain frequent and essential allusious to storeyed towers, galleries of pictures, and castes of painters, not to speak of the golden statue of a heroine and the magnificence of personal adornment. ... There is here no trace of the influence of the Greeks."

In another passage, remarkable as much for its impassioned eloquence as for the comprehensive sweep of its vision, Okakura says:

"India has carried and scattered the data of intellectual progress for the whole world, ever since the pre-Buddhistic period when she produced the Sankhya philosophy and the atomic theory; the fifth century, when her mathematics and astronomy find their blossom in Aryabhatta; the seventh, when Brahmagupta uses his highly developed Algebra and makes astronomical observations; the twelvth, brilliant with the glory of Bhaskaracharya and his famous daughter, down to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries themselves, with Ramchandra the mathematician, and Jagadis chandra Bose the physicist.... That the whole universe is manifest in every atom; that each variety, therefore, is of equal authenticity: that there is no truth unrelated to the unity of things; this is the faith that liberates the Indian mind in science, and even in the present day is so potent to free it from the hard shell of specialism that one of her sons has been enabled, with the severest scientific demonstration, to bridge over the supposed chasm between the organic and the inorganic worlds. Such a faith, in its early energy and enthusiasm, was the natural incentive to that great scientific age which was to produce astronomers like Aryabhatta, discovering the revolution of the earth on its own axis, and his not less illustrious successor, Varahamihira, which brought Hindu medicine to its height, perhaps under Susruta; and which finally gave to Arabia the knowledge with which she was later to fructify Europe."

This last line brings us again to the fact that much of the credit which superficial students give to the Arabs is in reality due to the Hindus. Professor Macdonell says that "in Science, the debt of Europe to India has been considerable" and then goes on to show that arithmetic, with its decimal system of notation, and algebra, were the gift of the Hindus, though the latter is known by an Arabic name. Prof. Sachau, quoted by Dr. P. C. Ray, shows

"Besides, they engaged Hindu scholars to come to Bagdad, made them the chief physicians of their hospitals, and ordered them to translate from Sanskrit into Arabic books on medicine, pharmacology, texicology, philosophy, astrology and other subjects."

We further learn from Dr. P. C. Ray's valuable Introduction that Mussalman students used to flock to the centres of learning in India, and there drank deep at the very fountain-head; that before the birth of Hippocrates, the Hindus had elaborated a system of medicine based upon the humoral pathology; that

"The knowledge in practical chemistry, prevalent in India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries A. D., and perhaps earlier,.........is distinctively in advance of the same period in Europe," and that "the metallurgical processes have little to be improved upon, and indeed, they may be transferred bodily to any treatise on modern chemistry ;" and that "the geometrical theorem of the 47th proposition, Book I, which tradition ascribes to Pythagoras, was solved by the Hindus at least two centuries earlier, thus confirming the conclusion of V. Schroeder that the Greek philosopher owed his inspiration to India. Nor must we forget that the most scientific grammar that the world has ever produced was composed in India about the seventh or eighth century B. C."

"It cannot be doubted that stored in that library were many manuscripts containing the wisdom of ancient eastern nations, of which there is now no record, but which must have been translated and embodied in the works of Greek authors at about this period."

Our last extracts will be made from a work on Hindu Astronomy published in 1896 by W. Brennand, who was sometime Principal of the Dacca College. The learned author observes in the Preface that the book owed its origin to ‘a conviction formed many years ago that the Hindus had not received the credit due to their literature and mathematical sciences from Europeans'. Regarding the antiquity of the Hindu system of astronomy Brennand says:

"It may be remarked that no one can carefully study the information collected by various investigators and translators of Hindu works relating to astronomy, without coming to the conclusion that, long before the period when Grecian learning founded the basis of knowledge and civilisation in the West, India had its own store of erudition......... The same observation and inference may be applied to the reasoning powers brought into play in the science of mathematics and kindred subjects, in which even in their most abstruse aspects, the Hindus, at any rate among the higher and more educated castes, have shown a deeply reflective capacity. In some quarters, an attempt has been made to minimise these faculties upon grounds which, in the opinion of the present

sophy as H.H. Wilson and Colebrooke said, but in the physical and the mathematical sciences. According to Gustav Oppert, (On the Weapons, Army Organisation, and

Political Maxims of the Ancient Hindus, 1880) the Hindus used small guns and cannon centuries before the Christian era, and gunpowder was an essentially Hindu invention. Dr. Hutton, in his History of Algebra, remarked :

The Hindus were further advanced in some of the branches of this science than the modern Europeans, with all their improvements, till the middle of the eighteenth century."

Mr. Stratchey, who translated Bhaskaracharya into English, was of opinion that the Hindus were well acquainted with most of the proposition in Euclid's elements. Mr. Rosen was of opinion that the Arabs received not only their first notions of Algebra and the decaimal notation, but also various important points of mathematical and astronomical observation, from the Hindus. Nor should we forget what Dr. Hutton says about the

the critics themselves a want of appreciation of the true merits of Hindu astronomy."

Brennand proceeds to show that the data "for the solution of the synodic

periods of the planets, the times of full and new moon, and other problems of a like nature, were well known in Europe." He quotes the great Laplace, who speaks of "the remarkable exactness of the mean motions which the Hindus have assigned to the sun and the moon, which necesvery ancient observasarily required tions." According to Brennand, the ignorance of the art of printing in mediæval India is responsible for the stationary condition of the Hindus with regard to their sciences as compared with the progress achieved in other countries. We shall close this lengthy review with one more extract from Brennand :

"No nation in existence can afford to compare its

latter-day tenets with its earliest theories and cosmography without a smile at the expense of ancestors; but the Hindus, in this view, may, with not a little justifiable pride, point to their sciences of astronomy, arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and even of trigono

metry, as containing within them evidences of traditional civilisation comparing favouraly with that of any other nation in the world.". G. B.

Brennand's Hindu Astronomy, copies of which may still be had of some of the retired professors of the Dacca college who were among his pupils, was not available even to Dr. P. C. Ray when he wrote his celebrated History of Hindu Chemistry, and valuable books by competent western scholars on the achievements of the ancient Hindus in surgery,

medicine, astronomy, mathematics, geometry, algeb ra, and the like, are long out of print, principally because, as we think, they were not encouraged by western readers, and the Indian public had not yet learnt to take an interest in them. In fact, we know that Brennand's book had to be published by subscrip tion for private circulation only. It would be a patriotic service of a high order to bring out reprints of these books, and the work may well be taken in hand by such munificent patrons of Indian learning as the Maharaja of Cassimbazar.

A

LTHOUGH education for women in the United States can be found at every stage of development, including the most backward, it can fairly be said, that, on the whole, the greatest opportunities in the world are offered to her here.

There are in general two systems of education; the Private School supported by gifts and endowments from people of wealth, and the Public School, with free instruction and compulsory attendance, supported by government taxes. The Private Schools are sectarian and non-sectarian; the Public Schools are entirely nonsectarian, as there is complete separation of church and state and absolute freedom of thought in religious matters.

Of these two systems the latter is by far the most conspicuous and extensive, and to the average person the word "edu. cation" immediately calls to mind the public school-house with its rich variety of offerings for the youth of the nation. Unless otherwise mentioned this paper will deal with Public School education for the average normal girl and woman, for there are two kinds of education; one for the normally developed and one for the defective classes, such as the blind, the epileptic, the feeble-minded, the deaf, deaf-mute and blind-deaf-mute, and the incorrigible who in older times were thrust into prisons. with hardened criminals and later sent to juvenile prisons or "reformatories", but are now given sound physical and trade education at State Industrial Schools.

Every village and town in the United States has at least one Public School where attendance is required by law for a

regular period during a certain number of years. The period of compulsory education varies from State to State and is shorter in rural than in urban districts, because children are needed on the farm. In the nor thern states education is much more advanced than in the southern. In the former Public School attendance is usually compulsory for children from 6 to 14 years of age during 9 months of every year, but there are always exceptions (more or less circumscribed), as to when and what children may leave school to go to work. In the South education is compulsory for only a few months during a few years because of the industrial value of little children in the cotton mills, but advanced education is offered to those who can afford the time to take it.

Boys and girls, young men and young women, are found side by side in all grades and nearly all classes of the Public Schools, except in a few of the largest cities where there are separate schools for each sex, but the teachers are always both men and women, except in the kindergarten and primary grades, where they are almost entirely women.

In general there are five classes of edu cation in the United States.