nd even with their
far-back beginnings. Yet it is a comparatively recent importation into
India; it is only the flower known in Britain as "the marvel of Peru,"
and cannot have been introduced into India more than three hundred years
ago. It was then that the Portuguese of India and the Spaniards of Peru
were first in touch within the home lands in Europe. In our own day may
be seen the potato and the cauliflower from Europe establishing
themselves upon the dietary of Hindus in defiance of the punctiliously
orthodox. _A fortiori_--strange that we should reason thus from the
trifling to the fundamental, yet not strange to the Anglo-Indian and the
Indian,--_a fortiori_, we shall not be surprised to find novel and alien
ideas taking root in Indian soil.

Seeds, we are told, may be transported to a new soil, either wind-borne
or water-borne, carried in the stomachs of birds, or clinging by their
burs to the fur of animals. In the cocoa-nut, botanists point out, the
cocoa-nut palms possess a most serviceable ark wherein the seed may be
floated in safety over the sea to other shores. It is thus that the
cocoa-nut palm is one of the first of the larger plants to show
themselves upon a new coral reef or a bare volcano-born island. Into
India itself, it is declared, the cocoa-nut tree has thus come over-sea,
nor is yet found growing freely much farther than seventy miles from the
shore. One of the chief interests of the subject before us is that the
seeds of the new ideas in India during the past century are so clearly
water-borne. They are the outcome of British influence, direct or
indirect.

Here are true test and evidence of the character of British influence
and effort, if we can distil from modern India some of the new ideas
prevailing, particularly in the new middle class. Where shall we find
evidence reliable of what British influence has been? Government
Reports, largely statistical, of "The Moral and Material Progress of
India," are so far serviceable, but only as _crude_ material from which
the answer is to be distilled. Members of the Indian Civil Service, and
others belonging to the British Government of India, may volunteer as
expert witnesses regarding British influence, but they are interested
parties; they really stand with others at the bar. The testimony of the
missionary is not infrequently heard, less exactly informed, perhaps,
than the Civil Servant's, but more sympathetic, and affording better
testimony