develop the mind of the taught so that it shall see, not what its teacher has led it to expect, but the fact that actually passes before the eyes, is the problem of all right scientific education. In history also, we want to be able to see, not the thing that would be pleasant, but the thing that is true. For this we have to go through a strenuous preparation.
With a few of the counters of the game, as it were, we take it for granted that one is already familiar. The great names of Indian history—Buddhism, Saivism, Vaishnavism, Islam—mean something to one. Gradually each student makes for himself his own scale of signs by which to compare the degrees of this or that quality that interests him. He chooses his own episode, and begins to see it in its proper setting. Behar, from its geographical and ethnological position, cannot fail to be one of the most complex and historically interesting provinces in India. In studying Behar, then, we early learn the truth of the dictum of the late Purna Chandra Mukherji, and whenever we find a tamarind, mentally substitute by way of experiment a bo-tree; or when we come across a rounded hillock with the grave of a/zV on the top, convert it into a stupa, and make it a Buddhist centre.[1] If we do this and cultivate the habit of
- ↑ To the Mohammedan the tamarind tree is holy, and the fact that on entering Behar he would plant it in the place of the do, or take the trouble to build a pir's tomb on a rounded hillock, goes far to show that the sacred character of the tree and hill was still at that moment maintained in Behar. That is to say, Buddhism was remembered.
