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of Cambridge, to free the slave. But Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and their associates were so occupied with Africa that they knew not that Great Britain was responsible for the existence of at least 9,000,000 of slaves in India, many of them brought by Hindoo merchants as well as Arabs from Eastern Africa to fill the hareems of Mohammedans, and do domestic service in the zananas of Hindoos. The startling fact came to be known only slowly towards the end of Carey's career, when his prayers, continued daily from 1779, were answered in the freedom of all our West India slaves. The East India answer came after he had passed away, in that Act V. of 1843 which for ever abolished the legal status of slavery in India. The Penal Code has since placed the prædial slave in such a position that if he is not free it is his own fault. It is penal in India to hold a slave "against his will," and we trust the time is not far distant when the last three words may be struck out.

With true instinct Christopher Anderson, in his Annals of the English Bible, associates Carey, Clarkson, and Cowper as the triumvirate who, unknown to each other, began the great moral changes, in the church, in society, and in literature, which mark the difference between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Little did Carey think, as he dwelt within sight of the poet's house, that Cowper was writing at that very time these lines in The Task while he himself was praying for the highest of all kinds of liberty to be given to the heathen and the slaves, Christ's freedom which had up till then remained.

By poets, and by senators unpraised,

Which monarchs cannot grant, nor all the powers

Of earth and hell confederate take away;

A liberty which persecution, fraud,

Oppression, prisons, have no power to bind :

Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more."

CHAPTER XII.

WHAT CAREY DID FOR SCIENCE-FOUNDER OF THE AGRICULTURAL AND HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF INDIA.

Carey's relation to science and economics—What the Danish-Halle missionaries had done—State of the peasantry—Carey a careful scientific observer— Specially a botanist—Becomes the friend of Dr. Roxburgh of the Company's Botanic Garden—Orders seeds and instruments of husbandry—All his researches subordinate to his spiritual mission—His eminence as a botanist acknowledged in the history of the science-His own botanic garden and park at Serampore—The poet Montgomery on the daisies there —Borneo-Carey's paper in the Asiatic Researches on the state of agriculture in Bengal—The first to advocate Forestry in India—Founds the Agri-Horticultural Society of India—Issues queries on agriculture and horticulture—Remarkable results of his action—On the manufacture of paper—His expanded address on agricultural reform—His political foresight on the importance of European capital and the future of India—An official estimate of the results in the present day—On the usury of the natives and savings banks—His academic and scientific honours—Destruction of his house and garden by the Damoodar floods—Report on the Horticultural Society's garden—The Society honours its founder.

Not only was the first Englishman, who in modern times became a missionary, sent to India when he desired to go to Tahiti or West Africa; and sent to Bengal from which all Northern India was to be brought under British rule; and to Calcutta—with a safe asylum at Danish Serampore—then the metropolis and centre of all Southern Asia; but he was sent at the very time when the life of the people could best be purified and elevated on its many sides, and he was specially fitted to influence each of these sides save one. An ambassador for Christ above all things like Paul, but, also

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like him, becoming all things to all men that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time, a captain of labour, a schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the expounder of the classical language, the translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure literature, the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing and the would-be suicide, of the downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific or the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or administrative as his Master did. But even then it was his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics alike to bring nations to the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of these principles to the course of God's providence and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of every race who have followed him in the past century. From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa, the greatest Christian evangelists have been those who have made science and literature the, handmaids of missions. An authority so competent as Mr. R. N. Cust, who was long himself a brilliant member of the civil service, declares with truth that it is doubtful whether the outturn of the combined labours of the civil and military services of British India would surpass that of an equal number of missionaries within a given period.1 Certainly, looked at on his many sides, and in the forty years of his continuous.

1 See his just criticism of Laurie's Ely Volume on the "Contributions of Foreign Missions to Science and Human Well-Being" (Boston, U.S.), in the Church Missionary Intelligencer for December 1884.

service to the people of India, in the midst of whom he lived, Carey is not surpassed by his predecessor, Sir William Jones, or by his contemporary and fellow-writer Colebrooke, while he is not rivalled by any others who may be named.

Yet Carey, though the most remarkable of all, and the first Englishman, was not the first of the missionaries in India to yoke science to the chariot of Christian truth. Niecamp's compilation from the accounts of the Danish-Halle Mission shows how much Ziegenbalg, Walter, Widebrog, and others did to reveal through Latin and German the Hindoo literature, geography, and mythology of Southern India in the first half of the eighteenth century. Dr. C. S. John, who joined that mission soon after the close of that period, and toiled with remarkable success till 1813 when he published his memorial on Indian Civilization, tells us that when he first landed at Tranquebar he found a whole collection of MSS. on palm leaves by his predecessors, and among these the Medicus Malabaricus and many more relics of botanical observations and researches in different sciences. Dr. Koenig was a scholar of Linnæus himself, and became an official of the East India Company, as did Dr. Heyne of the Moravian Mission. Drs. Martin, Klein, and Rottler were diligent botanists whose communications were gratefully acknowledged by the German scholars of the day. Dr. John tells us that, assisted by many an able youth among the natives, he had sent home above a hundred boxes of natural history specimens and curiosities collected in many countries and islands in the Indian Seas. The mission garden at Tranquebar had a nursery of useful trees, native and foreign, and it was his plan to make each of the free schools, with which he sought to cover a large district, a centre for improved "agriculture, grafting, and other particulars of gardening." When Schwartz's friend Guericke and he used to journey between Madras city and Chingleput, their dream was to

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clothe the barren hills, waste tracts, and depopulated villages with palm and other timber and fruit trees, which their missionary inspectors would attend to when visiting the free schools and preaching everywhere, and would teach the native schoolmasters and boys to care for in their leisure hours. "My late and living friends, Dr. Anderson, Dr. Russel, Dr. Roxburgh, and Dr. Benjamin Heyne would undoubtedly have had much greater success in their beneficial researches if they had found such assistants as these in their pursuits." Some forty years after, when Duff visited the famous old library of the mission at Tranquebar, for which Bishop Middleton had meanwhile offered four thousand pagodas in vain, he found a pile of MSS. in the writing of the old missionaries, all that was left after a mass had been sold for six shillings, to be used as wadding for the guns of the fort.

Apart from the extreme south of the peninsula of India, where these Danish missionaries had explored with hawk's eyes, almost nothing was known of its plants and animals, its men as well as its beasts, when Carey found himself in a rural district of North Bengal in the closing decade of last century. Nor had any writer, official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan cultivators as flowing from the relation of the people to the soil. All India was in truth a land of millions of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population. Ignorance and fear had blunted the natural shrewdness of the cultivator. A foul mythology, a saddening demon-worship,

1 This memorial was published by Rivingtons about 1813, and extracts from it will be found in the Apology published in that year, in which Buchanan eulogises Carey's services to science, p. 190.