came to nothing. He gave his collection of a thousand Oriental manuscripts to Harvard. Hall's experience as an American Sanskritologist in Benares can be found in a review of his friend Sherring's The Sacred City of the Hindus (to which Hall contributed the introduction), in the July 1869 issue of The Christian Examiner: Missionary Sherring devotes a large volume to a minute description of the holy city of Benares, because being the living oracle of the nation, presiding over the religious destiny of one hundred and eighty million, its future requires study. Here Hinduism is at home, in the bosom of its friends and admirers, courted by princes and millionaires, sustained by innumerable resources, embellished by thousands of temples and hundreds of thousands of idols, swarming with pilgrims, and crowned with the offerings of a superstitious devotion. Unhappily, he confines himself too much to the surface of things, giving us the dimensions of one temple after another in tedious iteration; the abundance of images, the superabundant filth, the manifest decay, the half-hidden traces of more ancient structures, marking them with a general uniformity. These shrines of one of the oldest religions are neither so vast, so beautiful, nor so worthy of imitation, as to require or repay this minute delineation. But very few and imperfectly illustrated are Mr Sherring's views of the condition of Hinduism itself and its future. Judged externally, it was never so flourishing; making an extraordinary effort to maintain itself against the inroads of European civilization under its priests, pundits, and princes; maintaining this immense city almost upon piety alone, gathering pilgrims by the acre, numbering its still occupied temples in its sacred city by the thousand. But beneath all this parade of piety is the increase of the thirst for knowledge as never before, the multiplication of debating societies, the predilection of young men for study, and the absolute freedom of thought; above all, the spreading sect of the Brahmos, who co-operate with the telegraph and railroad, the canal and the metalled road, in throwing India open to the quickening civilization of Europe. Few, indeed, study the Vedas now; Sanscrit is getting out of date; all classes are becoming scandalized by idolatry; Hinduism is held by a relaxing grasp; whenever the tide changes openly when the warm imagination of the Hindu is turned to Christianity, and his heart vitalized by its influence, India will lead the