Sir William Jones arrived in Calcutta in September, and entered on his judicial functions in December, 1783. One of his first employments was the organization of a scientific association, under the title of the Asiatic Society. The Governor-general, Warren Hastings, was requested to become president; and on his declining to accept, as an honorary distinction, an office the real duties of which he was unable to fulfil, Sir William Jones was fitly placed at the head of that institution, which, but for him, probably would not have existed. The transactions of that society, under the name of ‘Asiatic Researches,’ were published under his superintendence, and owe a large portion of their interest to the labours of his pen. Another work, the ‘Asiatic Miscellany,’ was also indebted to him for several valuable contributions. But the perfect acquisition of the Sanscrit language was the chief employment of that time which could be spared from his judicial labours; a task indeed subsidiary to those labours, and performed with the benevolent design of insuring to the Indian subjects of Britain a pure administration of justice, by rendering the knowledge of their laws accessible to British magistrates. Bound to adjudicate between the natives according to their own native laws, and ignorant for the most part of the very language in which those laws were written, the judges were obliged to have recourse to native lawyers, called Pundits, who were regularly attached to the courts as a species of assessors. Of these men Sir W. Jones, no harsh or hasty reprover, says, “It would be unjust and absurd to pass indiscriminate censure on so considerable a body of men; but my experience justifies me in declaring that I could not, with an easy conscience, concur in a decision merely on the written opinion of native lawyers, in a case in which they could have the remotest interest in misleading the court.” The obvious remedy was to obtain a trustworthy digest of the Hindoo laws, which should then be accurately translated into English. The scheme indeed had been already undertaken in part at the desire of Mr. Hastings, by Mr. Halhed: but as the code of Hindoo law, compiled by that gentleman, was merely a translation from a defective Persian version of the original Sanscrit, it did not possess the requisite correctness, or authority. It appears from Sir W. Jones’s correspondence, that at an early period he had contemplated supplying this great desideratum by his own labour and expense. But prudence did not warrant such an uncalled-for act of liberality; and he addressed a letter to Lord Cornwallis, dated March 19, 1788, in which the necessity for such a work, and the means by which it might be executed, are fully laid down. It was to be compiled by the Mohammedan or Hindoo lawyers, working under the superintendence of a director and translator, who should be qualified to check and correct intentional or careless error: and a chief difficulty, in Sir W.