botanical specimens, performed his many missionary tasks and journeyed into Calcutta to teach at Fort William College. They offered the boys structure, instruction and companionship. To their credit – and little to Carey's – all four boys went on to useful careers. Marsman's son, John Clark Marshman (1794–1877), was also to become an important part of the missionary work at the college; he was also an official Bengali translator and published a Guide to the Civil Law which, before the work of Macaulay, was the civil code of India; he also wrote a "History of India" (1842). Translation work Like Carey with whom he had come to work, Marshman was a talented and gifted scholar. Marshman and Carey together translated the Bible into many Indian Languages as well as translating much classical Indian literature into English, the first being their 1806 translation of the Ramayuna of Valmeeki. In early 1806, he, together with two of his sons and one of Carey's, moved to Serampore to begin training in Chinese under the instruction of Prof. Hovhannes Ghazarian (Johannes Lassar), a Macao-born Armenian, fluent in Chinese, who, together with two Chinese assistants, had been attracted to Fort William by Carey's promise of a salary of £450 per annum. Marshman studied for at least five years under Ghazarian during which time Ghazarian published several of the gospels. In 1809 he produced the first direct English translation of the Analects, replacing an existing 1724 indirect translation via French and Latin. The work describes itself as the first of two planned volumes, but the second volume does not appear to have ever made it to print. Marshman's November 1809 Dissertation on the Characters and Sounds of the Chinese Language was followed, in 1814, by his Clavis Sinica: Elements of Chinese Grammar, the former being the earliest known published work of Romanisation of Chinese for English speakers, pre-dating Davis (1824) and Morrison (1828). The quality of his work, both in principle and execution, was the subject of strident criticism from Davis. In 1817, the first translation of the Bible into Chinese, credited to Lassar and Marshman, was published. Marshman had an important role in the development of Indian newspapers. He was a keen proponent of the new developments in educational practice and was keen to encourage school teaching in local languages, even though the colonial authorities preferred that lessons be given in English. Foundation of Serampore