of machinery, for burnishing metals, and for the manufacture of pencils. The first mentioned use is the most important. Major Drummond considers that it may be applied also to the protection of the wood and iron works of bridges, inasmuch as the Americans use it as a preservative of wood.

We shall now conclude our notice of these Selections. In the course of this review, we have glanced at a considerable variety of subjects. But it must not be supposed that we have traversed the whole field of public improvement and enterprise in Upper India, or that we have touched upon all the publications issued by the Agra Government. Many subjects of deep importance, on which the greatest attention and interest have been bestowed, and with which the Government is most thoroughly identified, find no place among the Selections. A stranger might be tempted to exclaim, "what has become of education, of the Ganges canal, of the Rurki college, of prison discipline, of municipal and sanatory improvements, of the arrangements for the protection of travellers, and the furnishing of supplies, that nothing is said about them?" But in good truth, upon all these subjects, pamphlets and brochures, innumerable serials, annuals, quartos and octavos, have already been published. For the last fifteen years, the stream of publication has been continuous. On revenue, on statistics, on education, we have as much printed information as could be desired, and an idea can be formed of the extent to which knowledge, on public affairs, has been diffused by the printing press, when it is considered that these Selections comprise only one item in a long catalogue of publications.

Publications, such as those under review, most useful though they are, have yet a tendency to make us over-estimate actual results, and to suppose that things are no sooner thought of than done. But in India how vast is the interval between the conception, and the execution of philanthropic designs. If we reflect upon the various subjects suggested by the Selections, we shall see how many matters yet remain to be thought of. How many existing ideas are in an embryo state, how much theory has yet to be reduced to practice. That schemes of progress will ever be originated by the natives of India, is hope

The first requisite is, that the Government should frame designs and start the execution. The next requisite is, that popular co-operation should be secured. No Government can, unaided, elevate its subjects; it may take the initiative, but the work can only be successfully prosecuted by private means. These Selections amply show, that the first desideratum has been attained, but they cannot always show what advance has been made towards the attainment of the second. Still all well

wishers to India will see, from the lengthy series of documents published in the North Western Provinces, that there is a fermentation going on in the minds of public men of all grades and denominations, which must portend a good day coming. It is now more than ever necessary, that zeal and energy should be sustained in India, that the sacred fire should be kept alive and glowing-inasmuch as the present race of statesmen in England will never be induced to bestow on the East more than a languid and transitory attention. Where are now the successors of those statesmen who, three generations back, "schooled themselves to think and feel like Hindus, in order that they might present to Parliament a picture of the con'dition and the sufferings of India?" Could these mighty assailants of the Indian Governors, during the eighteenth century, behold the land as it now is, they would still raise their voice for further reform; but yet they would study, with earnest pleasure, the published record of what has been done. But we have little hope that these things will occupy the attention of either of the parliamentary committees now assembled to take an account of the Company's stewardship. How few of the schemes, nostrums, panaceas, or crotchets that have been propounded, in any way concern the welfare of the people! While statesmen in England, charged to legislate for India, amuse themselves with such things as the reduction of Leadenhall-street bureaucracy, the details of directorial patronage, the appointment of Commanders-in-Chief, the retention or abolition of Councils at the minor Presidencies, the constitution of the Court of Proprietors, the strength of our clerical establishment, the number of Queen's regiments serving in the East,-in most of which matters the "mild Hindu," doubtless, feels a lively interest,-statesmen in India are left unaided, to consider how the administration may be improved, how taxation may be modified, how education may be diffused, how inland navigation may be conducted, how mineral resources may be developed, how the thirsty land may be irrigated by canals, how the plains may be threaded by roads and railways, and the rivers spanned by bridges, how the scattered sections of the empire may be found together by the lightning communication of the electric telegraph! It is all well-exceedingly desirablethat the patronage should be regulated in the best manner possible, that the power of Government should be distributed in the most unexceptionable proportions between Boards and Courts, and Councils, Supreme and Local; but in so far as the interests of the people are concerned, there are matters more important than these.

ART. IV.-India in Greece; or truth in Mythology, containing the sources of the Hellenic race; the Colonization of Egypt and Palestine; the Wars of the Grand Lama; and the Budhistic Propaganda in Greece. By E. Pococke, Esq. London and Glasgow. 1852.

THE present are certainly the days of rapid intercourse. There is a restless spirit amongst engineers, merchants, and trading companies, which is staggered by no obstacles, is daunted by no dangers, and regards no expense. To obtain a sure and constant communication between the East and the West, time and money will be readily sacrificed. But the mental activity which forms grand conceptions, and the persevering energy which carries them out, are not confined solely to companies of utilitarians. Traces of the same haste and boldness are now seen to invade the departments of philology and scholarship. An overland communication must be shown to have been carried on between Greece and India, two or three thousand years ago. There are here difficulties to be encountered, and triumphs to be achieved, as remarkable as any which have ever illustrated the career of navigators and engineers. Learning has to solve difficult problems, to bridge over yawning chasms, to connect broken chains, if she would prove incontestably the identity of two distant nations at a period anterior to the commencement of history. To demonstrate that India migrated almost bodily into Hellas, that the Rajputs settled in Thessaly, may turn out to be as hard as to construct the promised railroad, which, passing by Bagdad and crossing Belochistan, is to bring the untravelled Londoner in eight or ten days to Bombay. There is, however, this difference between the two undertakings, that, while both are equally grand in appearance, the one must imperatively stake an enormous amount of capital, and demand a vast deal of science, and a great exercise of discretion, judgment, and sound good sense. Failure will be tantamount, perhaps to ruin, certainly to ridicule or disgrace. But the other, or the mental undertaking, stakes no capital, but that of the intellect, and can incur no loss, but that of scholarly reputation. The proposers of the gigantic railroad above alluded to, and Mr. Pococke, the author of the work before us, whom we have been led to link together, are obviously not starting on an equality. There is no check to rash adventure, which can at all compare with the prospect of a drained exchequer, and a bankrupt notoriety.

To be serious, we took up the work, whose title we have prefixed to this paper, with some expectation of deriving

pleasure therefrom. It would be gratifying, we thought, to know how far the connection between India and Greece had been ascertained by diligent, laborious, and patient investigation to see exactly the limits of our knowledge and of our ignorance: to discern where the enquirer was treading on firm and solid ground, and where he was still picking his way, with doubt and hesitation, over a tract infested with quicksands. We should have sympathized with a man who had mistrusted the proverbial delusions of a long-cherished theory, who had tested, by every criterion in his power, the conclusions he had arrived at by a searching examination, who had gratefully acknowledged the previous labours, and bowed to the authority of all the great directors of historical analysis. It would have been satisfactory to know the languages such a man had mastered, the medals he had consulted, the chronological tables he had pored over, the libraries he had ransacked. But, instead of the cautious doubt, the modest diffidence, the deference to the expressed opinions of German and English philologists, which generally characterize the performances of real scholars, we find in Mr. Pococke's volume, a series of extravagant theories and fancied resemblances, set forth with an habitual intolerance and an over-weening presumption, of which, in the nineteenth century, we should have thought any writer incapable.

We know nothing whatever of Mr. Pococke, except from his present work. But as he is not one of those persons who will allow their light to be hidden, and as he takes good care to make abundant references in his volume to his own literary performances, past and yet to come, we are enabled to present our readers with a sort of summary of a part of his literary career. We find then, from the dedication of the work, that a stranger, whom we must infer to be the author himself, had a casual interview with Mr. H. H. Wilson, the great orientalist. An intimation that the said interview was characterized on Mr. Wilson's part" by much urbanity," leaves us in doubt, whether the same is to be said of Mr. Pococke or the stranger himself; and whether he be not one of those obtrusive individuals who persist in introducing a favourite theory at all places and times, and in every society, to the confusion of all pleasant intercourse. After the interview the stranger found himself committed to a "pledge" of tracing "to their true sources, the pilgrim fathers of the Hellenic race.' The appearance of the present volume is, to a certain extent, the redemption of that pledge and we are thus benefitted by an "historical sketch of 'the fortunes of the Western Pandions of Athens, the Hellenes

or chiefs of the Hela in Greece, the Cashmerians of Boeotia and of the Thessalian Himalayas !" The above words are Mr. Pococke's own. The work is dedicated, as might be expected, to Mr. Wilson, the honoured Tricala of oriental literature, a phrase which we can best explain to un-oriental readers, by referring them to that curious old man of the sea, who could take all shapes at will, that of a tree, a tiger, or a bear, who was venerated by nymphs and consulted by enquiring strangers, like Mr. Pococke, and who knew all things:

Quæ sint, quæ fuerint, quæ mox ventura trahantur.

The qualifications brought by the author to the performance of the task above briefly described, are, that he is, we doubt not, a fair classic a poet, in spite of gods and columns, for he gives us sundry extracts from manuscript translations and original pieces that he has some knowledge of Persian and Sanscrit that he has written articles for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, (which fact of itself certainly indicates a position in the literary world at home,) that he is possessed of an extraordinary admiration for Buddhists and Rajputs, and that he unites to a boldness in theorizing, a power of surmounting difficulties, such as would appal other less ardent travellers, and a facility for mixing up old things and new, for fusing together the Semitic and the Indo-Germanic languages, such as we should have thought incredible in this age of historical investigation and common sense. We should add, too, that with the confidence inspired by past triumphs, with the growing ardour fostered by discoveries in Grecian history, our author, as he himself informs us, is now busied with two works, which will, no doubt, amaze the literary world, the one being the early history of Great Britain, and the other the early history of Rome. The first work is to include—much to the astonishment of those officers who fought in Affghanistan, and who will learn, for the first time, that they were then fighting against their own countrymen-the settlement of the Affghan tribe in Scotland, and of the Hibernas or Hya tribes in Ireland. And the second will contain the sources of the Roman policy and religion; and may, if we are to judge from the depreciating notices in the volume before us of many eminent scholars, prove Niebuhr's unrivalled sagacity and almost boundless learning, to have been, on many occasions, entirely at fault. To this we can only say that if another such tissue of fanciful theories, enunciated with such amazing confidence, is to result from a "casual interview" between Mr. Pococke and the great Avatar of Sanscrit literature and Hindu philosophy, we have only to pray,

that