The person demanding physical statistics gets enough pabulum in a day's search to keep the machinery of the mind going for months, and must be amazed when learning that there are seven hundred and twenty-one distinct languages and dialects spoken in India; that the population has trebled with the British occupation; that for every insane person in India there are thirteen in Europe,--the words "placid East" purveying the explanation. Taking the country by and large it is claimed that only one male in ten and only one female out of a hundred and forty-four, can read and write; and it is said by British residents in the land that the native knows no such thing as scholarship--he learns everything by rote, even to the extent of perfect recitation, without comprehending the meaning of the wards he is uttering. It is the nature of illiterate Hindus to resort to the extremest extravagance in nearly every statement, and it is not uncommon for report to have it that an Englishman has spoken abusively of a hundred thousand good Hindus, when that individual has merely intimated to a native servant that he would like his morning meal served with more punctuality. The illiterate Hindu, it is interesting to know, believes that the human soul passes through eight million reincarnations. When this child of the East deals with numbers his tongue runs into meaningless extravagance, and there appears to be no communion between his intellect and speech. While marriage is universal in India, if not obligatory, the custom forbidding the remarriage of widows works an injustice to the sex amounting to national disgrace. A Hindu maiden who at twelve or thirteen is unmarried brings social obloquy on her family and entails retrospective damnation on three generations of ancestors. A Hindu man must marry and beget children to make certain of his funeral rites, lest his spirit wander uneasily in the waste places of the earth or be precipitated into the temporary hell called _Put_. The last available census discloses the astonishing fact that there are twenty-six million widows in India, meaning that out of every hundred women at least fourteen have been bereft of their husbands, and consequently are no better than human derelicts upon the earth. It is a teaching of the abominable Hindu faith that the bridegroom cometh but once. A pundit of the belief will argue that the practical reason for prohibiting remarriage is to prevent the crowding of the marriage market--and this is the only "reason" that can be extracted from one claiming to speak with knowledge on the unfortunate subject. The enlightened Gaekwar of Baroda, devoting influence and fortune to the moral uplifting of the people of his land, pronounces the custom forbidding the remarriage of widows to be a national curse exceeded only by that compassed by the word "caste."