illustrate some only of the collected
stores which are available; but we believe
that Dr. Forbes Watson is laudably
endeavouring to get these fibres well known in the
manufacturing districts: a mode of really
benefitting both India and England. The
same may be said of the drugs, oils, dyes,
tanning materials, and vegetable foods, of the
East; the more they are known in this
country, the more probability there is that the
industrious Hindu will "see the colour" of
English money, and feel the benefit of English
manufactures. This is, indeed, the department
to which the greatest additions have
been made by the India authorities during
the last dozen years or so; and although the
exhibited contents of the Museum comprise
only a per-centage of the whole store, there
are materials for many a useful lesson there.
Nor is the animal kingdom neglected; the
hair, wool, fur, feathers, skins, hides, vellum,
horn, bone, silk, &c., of Oriental animals are
variously illustrated.

But to see the Hindu at home is perhaps
the most instructive part of the Museum; to
see him surrounded by the material requisite
for his daily existence. In regard to his trade
or employment, we find models of looms,
ploughs, mills, smiths' bellows, windlasses,
pestles and mortars. In his travelling appliances
we find the gorgeous howdah, the lazy
palanquin, the dâk postchaise, and the rude
cart. In his culinary and table arrangements,
very marvels of simplicity, we have the hand-
mill with which the women grind the corn;
the pans for parching the grain, and the rice;
the dough-trough for making the cakes; the
suspended crock for the boilings and steamings;
the bits of skewers that serve as a
substitute for the roasting-jack; the vessels for
drinking, which must be used exclusively by
their owners, under pain of loss of caste by
pollution from other lips. The little models,
constructed by Hindu fingers, are especially
valuable as illustrations of this kind, seeing
that they represent at once the people and the
implements. The tailor is shown, exactly as
he sits while making or mending a garment;
the shoemaker has his own traditional mode of
using a lapstone; the bricklayer, plasterer,
mason, carpenter, and smith, are shown with
their house-building tools and implements;
the painter, glazier, plumber, gilder, decorator,
are duly present; the quarryman, brickmaker,
sower, reaper, ploughman, irrigator; the makers
and users of all sorts of things; are here to be
seen in great variety. The family groups, too,
include models of women wrapped up in their
clothing in an odd way, children with no
clothing at all, and babies packed and strapped
into oblong bundles without power of using a
limb, poor little wretches! One group of
models represents a native court of appeal,
the contending litigants, the counsel, the
witnesses, the judge, the clerks, the police, and
the public: wonderfully like Westminster
Hall, in spirit, if not in outward form. Another
is a very gorgeous affair, an Indian prince
being entertained with a nautch or dance;
the prince, courtiers, dancing girls, musicians,
hookahs, refreshment trays, dresses, cushions,
curtains, all are as glittering as gold and colour
and embroidery can make them.

The musical instruments brought from the
East are in many cases very curious, showing
peculiar modes of applying the same principles as
those with which we are all familiar. One
consists of about three octaves of sounding sticks,
flattish pieces of hard wood from ten to fifteen
inches in length; they are ranged along a
double string, with the surfaces horizontal, and
emit a dullish, wooden sound when struck with
a cork hammer. Yes, Master Bonnay's
Xylophone was long ago anticipated in the East, but
in a primitive way which that young performer
would by no means have recognised. The
monotonous tom-tom is here, in its glory of
tinsel and tinkling appendages, ready to be
tapped by the nimble fingers of the Hindu.
The wind instruments and stringed instruments,
of whatever forms they may be, impress
one with the idea that the national music for
which they are suited, must be of a very primitive
and undeveloped kind; and this, indeed,
we know to be the case: rhythm, melody, and
harmony, all being deficient.

The costume of the natives of India, from
the rajah to the pariah, can here be studied
with great completeness. The kind of spun
fibres employed, the kind of stuff woven
from the fibres, and the shape of the
garment. The study can best be carried on by
means of several splendid volumes of
photographs and specimens, prepared at the cost of
the India Department, by Dr. Forbes Watson;
but even without these, there is wherewithal
at the Museum to excite the interest of our
spinners, weavers, tailors, and dressmakers.
We find, for instance, that a large propertion
of India clothing is made entirely in the loom:
that is, not merely the material, but the
garment itself is made by weaving, without the
aid of the scissors or needle. Among these
loom-made garments are the pugaree or turban,
made of a quadrangular piece of woven
material, twisted up in an almost infinite number
of ways; the loonghie or body-garment, a kind
of long shawl wound round in even a greater
number of ways than the turban; the dhotee,
a sort of loin-cloth, sometimes the only covering
except the turban, of the poorest class of
natives; the cummer- bund or waist-band, a very
long strip about a foot wide, and wrapped
around the person as voluminously as the
wearer may choose; the pitambus, a sort of
silken dhotee worn by the Brahmins when at
meals; the saree, a shawl so large as to serve
a Hindu woman for shawl, head-dress, and
even petticoat, according to the way in which
it is thrown around the person; the booka, an
enormous veil worn instead of the saree, with
holes for the eyes to peep through. If we wish
to know the infinite capabilities of a quadrangular
piece of cloth as a garment, we may learn
something from the Scotch plaid, and something
from the Spanish mantilla, but very much more