ed Cambridge
Mathematician once told me that he set a problem for the Mathematical
Tripos, basing it upon Ramachundra's "Maxima and Minima," and with the
exception of a few that headed the list, none were able to solve the
problem. In the late Toru Dutt, a young Bengali native Christian lady,
some of the leading literary men of England found a poet of no mean
powers. Mr. Edmund Gosse writes as follows in the preface to her poems
that have been published by an English firm: "It is difficult to
estimate what we have lost in the premature death of Toru Dutt.
Literature has no honours which need have been beyond the grasp of a
girl who, at the age of twenty-one, and in languages separated from her
own by so deep a chasm, had produced so much of lasting worth.... When
the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there
is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of
song." Dr. Bandarkar of Bombay is considered to be one of the best
Orientalists of the day. A number of Bengali gentlemen have earned a
lasting fame by literary productions in English, among whom I may
mention the Rev. Lal Behari Day, late Professor in the Hooghly College,
and Mr. Dutt of the Bengal Civil Service. In our own Presidency Mr.
Ramakrishna Pillai has produced a work in English--"Village Life in
India"--that has won the praise of Sir Grant Duff.--_Professor
Satthianadhan's Lecture on Intellectual Results in India_.

Mr. Ramakrishna takes a typical village in the Madras Presidency, "the
most Indian part of India," and shows us in half a dozen lucid chapters
that the wants of the villagers are all material--wells, roads, better
breeds of cattle, and so on--and that they do not, and will not for a
long time, care one cash for anything which happens, or which might be
made to happen, in the great outer world beyond their palm-groves and
rice-fields. There is nothing political in this pleasant little book, we
are pleased to say, although we have drawn this political moral from it.
It is a truthfully written account of native life in one of those 55,000
villages which dot the great district--a tract much larger than the
British Isles--the daily existence of whose peaceful, and not altogether
unhappy, population it is intended to illustrate; and it can be dipped
into, or read through, with equal satisfaction and advantage,--_Daily
Telegraph_ (London).

"Life in an Indian Village" is an amusing and clear portrayal of