They are also taught needle-work. The following is the distribution of the scholars into four grades of Bengali instruction:—
| (a) | Girls who read only | . . . | 112 |
| (b) | Girls„ who write on the ground | . . . | ⟨2⟩ |
| (c) | Girls„ who write„ on the palm-leaf | . . . | ⟨57⟩ |
| (d) | Girls„ who write„ on the plantain-leaf | . . . | ⟨4⟩ |
⟨The only other institution in this district to be noticed is an infants’ school situated on the Church Mission premises in the neighbourhood of Burdwan. The children are about 15 in number of both sexes, partly Native Christian children and partly orphans. They are under the care of Miss Jones, lately arrived from England, and well acquainted with the modes of infant instruction in use there. The ear is chiefly taught, and the exercises are pronounced in recitative.⟩
District of South Behar.
⟨In this district there is only one institution to be noticed under the present section. At Sahebgunge, the chief town of the district, a school in which English, Persian, and Arabic are taught has been established by Raja Mitrajit Singh of Tikari, and is superintended by his son Mirza Bahadur Khan. Two Maulavis and and one English teacher are employed; and as they discharge their respective duties without any connection or communication with each other, I have preferred considering them as at the head of three separate institutions. The Raja has granted the use of a garden-house for the purposes of the school, but one of the Maulavis causes his pupils, six in number, to attend him at his own dwelling-house, and the other meets his, five in number, in one of the apartments of the garden-house. The two schools have already been enumerated amongst the Persian and Arabic schools in Section IX.⟩
Section XII.
General Remarks on the State of Instruction in the Schools mentioned in the preceding Section.
It is impossible for me fully to express the confirmed conviction I have acquired of the utter impracticability of the views of those, if there are any such, who think that the English language should be the sole or chief medium of conveying knowledge to the natives. Let any one conceiving the desirableness of such a plan abandon in imagination at least the metropolis of the province or the chief town of the district in which he may happen to be living, and with English society let him abandon for a while his English
