TO THE RIGHT HONORABLE LORD VISCOUNT FALKLAND, MY LORD, BOMBAY. We have the honor to lay before you the Report of our Pro Period comprised in Report. ceedings for the year 1850, and for so much of the year 1851 as includes the Session closing with the general vacation, which begins on the 1st May; and as by this arrangement we shall be enabled to present to your Lordship in Council the narrative of proceedings at some of our most important Institutions at an earlier period. after their occurrence than heretofore, we propose, in future, that our Annual Reports should coincide with the academical and financial year ending April 30th. 2. We have to record, that in 1850 our Board was Changes at the Board. strengthened by the addition of Dr. McLennan, who was re-appointed to the place he had so long filled among us on his return from Europe; and that Captain S. V. W. Hart vacated his seat, in consequence of being compelled to leave the Presidency on sick certificate. At a later period in the year Framjee Cowasjee, Esquire, resigned his seat, in consequence of his advanced time of life, and the vacancy was filled up by the election of Bomanjee Hormusjee, Esquire. The eminent good citizenship, and zeal in supporting every measure for public improvement, which distinguished our late much esteemed colleague, are too well known to your Lordship in Council to need any notice from us, but in recording his death, which subsequently occurred at the good old age of 84, the Board feel a melancholy pleasure in thus publicly expressing the respect in which they hold his memory. 3. Early in 1850 our attention was called to the strictures of the Hon'ble Mr. Willough Strictures of Honorable Mr. Willoughby on Government system. by on the system of education in the different Institutions under the control of the Board. That gentleman, having been induced, by a reference from this Board in the year 1849, to consider the question of Native education for the first time, felt himself compelled, after a careful study of the best authorities extending over many months, to pronounce the following unfavorable opinion:-"I regret to add that the result of my inquiries has led me to the conclusion that the present state of education is by no means satisfactory; that the system we are pursuing is, in several respects, defective; and that the general results are not even commensurate with the very limited amount assigned annually for educational purposes."* As these opinions were apparently sanctioned by Government, and as we were further given to understand that a recommendation to the Hon'ble Court for an additional educational grant was not to be made until "the defects of the existing system have been amended,”† it became our duty to make a dispassionate and impartial survey of the course of our proceedings, and to ascertain whether the faults imputed were referrible to causes over which the Board had any control, and whether any practical suggestions for improvement had been made, which it lay within the competence of the Board to adopt. Examination of system necessary from conflicting views of autho 4. But additional reasons existed for making such a survey desirable. It has been of ten observed that from the proneness of the human mind to error, although fallacious opinions may have been once completely ex rities. p. 136. * Report of Board of Education, 1847-48, ploded in the judgment of all sound thinkers, nevertheless the same fallacies are sure to present themselves at some subsequent period clothed in a different dress, and the same process of argument and refutation has to be gone through to satisfy the minds of those who have not made themselves masters of the previous stages of the inquiry. Moreover, the subject of national education cannot be considered at present as altogether established on a firm basis: conflicting theories are found to be struggling for supremacy in the highest places, and thereby, not only are the efforts of benevolent individuals desirous to diffuse education according to their means liable to be diverted into numerous unconnected and often chimerical directions, but the proceedings of Government Institutions, from the want of any fixed system being recognized, are exposed to the contingency of complete change at the suggestion of any ingenious or novel inquirer. 5. Thus, the Board System adopted by Board founded on views of Court of Directors. of Education at this Presidency, having laid down a scheme of education, in accordance with the leading injunctions of Dispatches from the Honorable Court, and founded not more on the opinions of men who had been attentively considering the progress of education in India, such as the Earl of Auckland, Major Candy, and others, than on the openly-declared wants of the most intelligent of the Natives themselves, the Board, we repeat, were informed by your Lordship's predecessor in Council, "that the process must be reversed." 6. Moreover, the expediency, or rather the necessity, of Authoritative decision of Bombay Government on the medium of superior Edueation. conveying all superior education through the medium of English was considered to be altogether a settled question, unopen to argument, all over India, yet the strong opinions of Colonel Jervis, that "an individual, when educated solely through the medium of a foreign language, is still unable to impart the results to others, through the medium of his own,* and that "experience showed that Natives who speak English well, and can even write it with tolerable accuracy, cannot read and understand the commonest English work. The fact is, that they have learned words, but not ideas," echoed, as they were, in influential quarters, made it imminent in this Presidency that a total change was at hand, and it was not until the receipt of the authoritative decision of your Lordship in Council, contained in Mr. Lumsden's letter (dated 24th April 1850), that the danger could be considered to have been averted. Views of Court of Directors on Oriental Literature. 7. Again, the attempts of Oriental scholars to give direct encouragement to Institutions for the propagation of that species of learning which they themselves had acquired by long and painful exertions, might have been deemed to have been crushed for ever by the masterly Dispatch of the Hon'ble Court in 1824, in which they gave utterance to expressions that have been responded to as sound by all able statesmen and thinkers not blinded by a predilection for favorite studies. "In professing," say the Court, "to establish seminaries for the purpose of teaching mere Hindu or mere Mahomedan literature, you bound yourselves to teach a great deal of what was frivolous, not a little of what was purely mischievous, and a small remainder indeed in which utility was in any way concerned." Yet we perceive by the last Report on Public Instruction in Bengal for 1848-9 clear indications that a movement in favor of ancient Oriental Literature is at work in some quarters, though stoutly combatted by the Bengal Council of Public Instruction. Report, ub. supra, page 58. + Report, ub. supra, page 83. + Dispatch from Honorable Court, 29th September 1830. 8. Equally wise, if we may be permitted to use the ex Views of Court on the expediency of educating the upper classes. pression, do the indications of the Hon'ble Court appear to us to be as to the quarters to which Government education should be directed, and especially with the very limited funds which are available for this branch of expenditure. The Hon'ble Court write to Madras in 1830 as follows:-"The improvements in education, however, which most effectually contribute to elevate the moral and intellectual condition of a people, are those which concern the education of the higher classes of the persons possessing leisure and natural influence over the minds of their countrymen. By raising the standard of instruction amongst these classes, you would eventually produce a much greater and more beneficial change in the ideas and feelings of the community than you can hope to produce by acting directly on the more numerous class. You are, moreover, acquainted with our anxious desire to have at our disposal a body of Natives qualified by their habits and acquirements to take a larger share, and occupy higher situations, in the civil administration of their country than has been hitherto the practice under our Indian Governments." Nevertheless, we hear on so many sides, and even from those who ought to know better, of the necessity and facility for educating the masses, for diffusing the arts and sciences of Europe amongst the hundred or the hundred and forty millions (for numbers count for next to nothing) in India, and other like generalities indicating cloudy notions on the subject, that a bystander might almost be tempted to suppose the whole "resources of the State were at the command of educational Boards, instead of a modest pittance inferior in amount to sums devoted to single establishments in England.† House of Commons' Report on East Indian Affairs, 1832. Vol. 2, Public, page 510. + The total sum granted by Government to the Bombay Board of Educa |