Your Highness,
In laying before the public this little book—the
fruit of the very few leisure hours in the daily work of a Missionary in
India—and dedicating it to Your Highness a few words of explanation
will not be out of place. Your Highness, whose name is so intimately
connected with the progress of learning and science in this part of India,
has taken such cordial interest in all attempts at the production of a
Malayālam literature, that as soon as I decided upon writing a book on
Physics in Malayālam, I made up my mind to solicit Your Highness's
interest and sympathy. I did so not only to secure for my book Your
Highness's approval and patronage, which is highly necessary for a book
of this kind written by a foreigner, but also to take advantage of an op
portunity to express my deep respect for Your Highness, the Mecaenas
of Malabar, whose aspirations and aims agree in many respects with those
of the author of this book—how different soever the spheres of life and
the points of view may be.
In justification of my writing a book on Physics in Malayalam my
opinion has been most eloquently expressed by the Lord Bishop of Lahore
(in a lecture on the Lahore University) in the following words: "What
I plead for is, let the broad and fair stream of knowledge, which has been
swollen from a thousand Eastern and Western affluents in our English
literature, be deduced and parted into hundreds of rivulets reaching through
the Vernaculars of India to the myriad homes and hearths of the people
of this great country, Let no patriotic and public spirited man say, you
shall be kept in ignorance of the most pregnant and beneficial discoveries
and the most perfect mind-growths of the ages, except you will pass through
the gate of the English tongue or some other still less accessible language.”
It seems to me that no one interested in the Malayālam language and in
