one. But the book roused my interest afresh, and I took a Tamil munshi for about three years to go through all the proverbs I had found in other collections, and those I now found in Mr. Lazarus's book, and also those I had collected myself. This study with my munshi together with the kind help I got from other Tamil people led me to a fuller understanding of Oriental proverbial literature, and after a couple of years investigation, I got the idea of publishing a collection of these beautiful national sayings. But no sooner had I began to realize the idea, than I felt how much easier it was to get an idea than to carry it out. And hundreds of times, when going on with this work, have I felt the force of the Tamil proverb: "I stepped into the water without knowing its depth."
When the idea of publishing a collection of Tamil proverbs occurred to me, I saw at once that I had great difficulties to face. I had the difficulty oftwo languages, both of which were foreign to me. I had the fear—and still have it—that it might be too much for a foreigner to venture on the publication of Tamil proverbs, as proverbs undoubtedly form the most difficult branch of a nation's literature to comprehend. Besides this, it was clear to me that if I were to publish Tamil proverbs, I could not adopt the usual alphabetical order, but would have to arrange them into groups. Another difficulty—and without comparison the most important one—was to get the proper meaning of the proverbs, not as some pandits may please to explain them, but as common men and women understand them, when they use them in their every day life. Another difficulty, again, was to have these thousands of proverbs before me sifted. What was to be taken, and what to be left out? It always seemed to me that our collections of proverbs suffered from a great evil, viz., that they contained too many useless sayings, too many aphorisms and too many repetitions of the same proverbs.
With these difficulties before me I started, hoping that the proverb would prove true: "Little strokes at last fell great oaks," or as we say in Tamil: "Stroke upon stroke will make oven a grindstone creep."
When going into the study of Tamil proverbs one finds that little has been done in the way of making a scientific investigation of them. All proverbs, sayings and aphorisms we meet with in our
