ls of their lively
growth.

The Ooriya version was almost the first to be undertaken after the
Bengali, to which language it bears the same relation as rural Scotch
to English, though it has a written character of its own. What is now
the Orissa division of Bengal, separating it from Madras to the
south-west, was added to the empire in 1803. This circumstance, and
the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries of sun-worship and
then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of the vaishnava cult of
Jaganath and his car, which attracted and often slew hundreds of
thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey to prepare at once for the
press the Ooriya Bible. The chief pundit, Mritunjaya, skilled in both
dialects, first adapted the Bengali version to the language of the
Ooriyas, which was his own. Carey then took the manuscript, compared it
with the original Greek, and corrected it verse by verse. The New
Testament was ready in 1809, and the Old Testament in 1815, the whole
in four volumes. Large editions were quickly bought up and circulated.
These led to the establishment of the General Baptist Society's
missionaries at Cuttak, the capital.

In 1814 the Serampore Bible translation college, as we may call it,
began the preparation of the New Testament in Maghadi, another of the
languages allied to the Bengali, and derived from the Sanskrit through
the Pali, because that was the vernacular of Buddhism in its original
seat; an edition of 1000 copies appeared in 1824. It was intended to
publish a version in the Maithili language of Bihar, which has a
literature stretching back to the fourteenth century, that every class
might have the Word of God in their own dialect. But Carey's literary
enthusiasm and scholarship had by this time done so much to develop and
extend the power of Bengali proper, that it had begun to supersede all
such dialects, except Ooriya and the northern vernaculars of the valley
of the Brahmapootra. In 1810 the Serampore press added the Assamese
New Testament to its achievements. In 1819 the first edition appeared,
in 1826 the province became British, and in 1832 Carey had the
satisfaction of issuing the Old Testament, and setting apart Mr. Rae, a
Scottish soldier, who had settled there, as the first missionary at
Gowhatti. To these must be added, as in the Bengali character though
non-Aryan languages, versions in Khasi and Manipoori, the former for
the democratic tribes of the Khasia hills am