DHARAMPAL • COLLECTED WRITINGS

sufficiently matured to acquire it. The teachers depend entirely
upon their scholars for subsistence, and being little respected
and poorly rewarded, there is no encouragement for persons of
character, talent or learning to engage in the occupation. These
schools are generally held in the houses of some of the most
respectable native inhabitants or very near them. All the child-
ren of the family are educated in the vernacular language of the
country; and in order to increase the emoluments of the
teachers, they are allowed to introduce, as pupils, as many
respectable children as they can procure in the neighbourhood.
The scholars begin with tracing the vowels and consonants with
the finger on a sand-board and afterwards on the floor with a
pencil of steatite or white crayon; and this exercise is continued
for eight or ten days. They are next instructed to write on the
palm-leaf with a reed-pen held in the fist not with the fingers,
and with ink made of charcoal which rubs out, joining vowels to
the consonants, forming compound letters, syllables, and words,
and learning tables of numeration, money, weight, and measure,
and the correct mode of writing the distinctive names of persons,
castes, and places. This is continued about a year. The iron style
is now used only by the teacher in sketching on the palm-leaf
the letters which the scholars are required to trace with ink.
They are next advanced to the study of arithmetic and the use of
the plantain-leaf in writing with ink made of lamp-black, which
is continued about six months, during which they are taught
addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and the
simplest cases of mensuration of land and commercial and
agricultural accounts, together with the modes of address proper
in writing letters to different persons. The last stage of this
limited course of instruction is that in which the scholars are
taught to write with lamp-black ink on paper, and are further
instructed in agricultural and commercial accounts and in the
composition of letters. In country places the rules of arithmetic
are principally applied to agricultural and in towns to
commercial accounts; but in both town and country schools the
instruction is superficial and defective. It may be safely affirmed
that in no instance whatever is the orthography of the language
of the country acquired in those schools, for although in some of
them two or three of the more advanced boys write out small
portions of the most popular poetical compositions of the
country, yet the manuscript copy itself is so inaccurate that they
only become confirmed in a most vitiated manner of spelling,
which the imperfect qualifications of the teacher do not enable
him to correct. The scholars are entirely without instruction,
both literary and oral,