Life of William Carey by George Smith - The Jesus Army

CHAPTER XII
WHAT CAREY DID FOR SCIENCE--FOUNDER OF THE AGRICULTURAL AND
HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF INDIA
Carey’s relation to science and economics--State of the peasantry--Carey a careful scientific observer--Specially
a botanist--Becomes the friend of Dr. Roxburgh of the Company’s Botanic
Garden--Orders seeds and instruments of husbandry--All his researches subordinate to his spiritual
mission--His eminence as a botanist acknowledged in the history of the science--His own
botanic garden and park at Serampore--The poet Montgomery on the daisies there--Borneo--
Carey’s paper in the Asiatic Researches on the state of agriculture in Bengal--The first to advocate
Forestry in India--Founds the Agri-Horticultural Society of India--Issues queries on agriculture
and horticulture--Remarkable results of his action--On the manufacture of paper--His expanded
address on agricultural reform--His political foresight on the importance of European
capital and the future of India--An official estimate of the results in the present day--On the
usury of the natives and savings banks--His academic and scientific honours--Destruction of his
house and garden by the Damoodar flood of 1823--Report on the Horticultural Society’s
garden--The Society honours its founder.
NOT only was the first Englishman, who in modern times became a missionary, sent to India when he
desired to go to Tahiti or West Africa; and sent to Bengal from which all Northern India was to be
brought under British rule; and to Calcutta--with a safe asylum at Danish Serampore--then the metropolis
and centre of all Southern Asia; but he was sent at the very time when the life of the people could best
be purified and elevated on its many sides, and he was specially fitted to influence each of these sides save
one. An ambassador for Christ above all things like Paul, but, also like him, becoming all things to all men
that he might win some to the higher life, Carey was successively, and often at the same time, a captain of labour,
a schoolmaster, a printer, the developer of the vernacular speech, the expounder of the classical language,
the translator of both into English and of the English Bible into both, the founder of a pure literature,
the purifier of society, the watchful philanthropist, the saviour of the widow and the fatherless, of the despairing
and the would-be suicide, of the downtrodden and oppressed. We have now to see him on the scientific or
the physical and economic side, while he still jealously keeps his strength for the one motive power of all, the
spiritual, and with almost equal care avoids the political or administrative as his Master did. But even then it
was his aim to proclaim the divine principles which would use science and politics alike to bring nations to
the birth, while, like the apostles, leaving the application of these principles to the course of God’s providence
and the consciences of men. In what he did for science, for literature, and for humanity, as in what he abstained
from doing in the practical region of public life, the first English missionary was an example to all of
every race who have followed him in the past century. From Carey to Livingstone, alike in Asia and Africa, the
greatest Christian evangelists have been those who have made science and literature the handmaids of missions.
Apart from the extreme south of the peninsula of India, where the Danish missionaries had explored with
hawk’s eyes, almost nothing was known of its plants and animals, its men, as well as its beasts, when Carey
found himself in a rural district of North Bengal in the closing decade of the eighteenth century. Nor had any
writer, official or missionary, anywhere realised the state of India and the needs of the Hindoo and Mohammedan
cultivators as flowing from the relation of the people to the soil. India was in truth a land of millions
of peasant proprietors on five-acre farms, rack-rented or plundered by powerful middlemen, both
squeezed or literally tortured by the Government of the day, and driven to depend on the usurer for even the
seed for each crop. War and famine had alternated in keeping down the population. Ignorance and fear had
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