to which the circles they
live and move in attach importance. In such societies we are,
therefore, always coming in contact with men whose scientific
knowledge is necessarily very precise, and at the same time very
extensive, while their manners and conversation are of the highest
polish. There is, perhaps, nothing which strikes a gentleman from
India so much on his entering a society differently constituted, as
the superior precision of men's information upon scientific subjects;
and more especially upon that of the sciences more immediately
applicable to the arts by which the physical enjoyments of men are
produced, prepared, and distributed all over the world. Almost all
men in India feel that too much of their time before they left
England was devoted to the acquisition of the dead languages; and too
little to the study of the elements of science. The time lost can
never be regained--at least they think so, which is much the same
thing. Had they been well grounded in the elements of physics,
physiology, and chemistry before they left their native land, they
would have gladly devoted their leisure to the improvement of their
knowledge; but to go back to elements, where elements can be learnt
only from books, is, unhappily, what so few can bring themselves to,
that no man feels ashamed of acknowledging that he has never studied
them at all till he returns to England, or enters a society
differently constituted, and finds that he has lost the support of
the great majority that always surrounded him in India.[15] It will,
perhaps, be said that the members of the official aristocracy of all
countries have more or less of the same defects, for certain it is
that they everywhere attach paramount or undue importance to the
conventional learning of the grammar-school and the drawing-room, and
the ignorant and the indolent have everywhere the support of a great
majority. Johnson has, however, observed:

'But the truth is that the knowledge of external nature and the
sciences, which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the
great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we provide
for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or pleasing,
the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge of right and
wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of mankind, and
with those examples which may be said to embody truth, and prove by
events the reasonableness of opinions.[16] Prudence a