PREFACE
...Bengal: in which my principal aim has been to comprehend everything necessary to be known, not contenting myself with a superficial or partial view, not confining my observations to the more obvious particularities. A short treatise, when preceded by other more copious and diffusive compilations on the same subject, may perhaps pass for a judicious abstract, or an elegant compendium, but every emission of the writer who hath chosen an unhandled topic will be imputed to ignorance or neglect by those whose subsequent discoveries may have furnished more complete information.
The grand Source of Indian Literature, the parent of almost every dialect from the Persian Gulph to the China Seas, is the Shanscrit, a language of the most venerable and unfathomable antiquity; which although at present shut up in the libraries of
Bramins and appropriated solely to the records of their Religion, appears to have been current over most of the Oriental World; and traces of its original extent may still be discovered in almost every district of Asia. I have been astonished to find the similitude of Shanscrit words with those of Persian and Arabic, and even of Latin and Greek: and these are not in technical or metaphorical terms, which the mutation of refined arts and improved manners might have occasionally introduced; but...
