The Sanskrit version was translated from the original, and written out by the toiling scholar himself. Sir William Jones is said to have been able to secure his first pundit's help only by paying him Rs. 500 a month, or £700 a year. Carey engaged and trained his many pundits at a twentieth of that sum. He well knew that the Brahmans would scorn a book in the language of the common people. "What," said one who was offered the Hindi version, "even if the books should contain divine knowledge, they are nothing to us. The knowledge of God contained in them is to us as milk in a vessel of dog's skin, utterly polluted." But, writes the annalist of Biblical Translations in India, Carey's Sanskrit version was cordially received by the Brahmans. Destroyed in the fire in 1812, the Old Testament historical books were again translated, and appeared in 1815. In 1827 the aged saint had strength to bring out the first volume of a thorough revision, and to leave the manuscript of the second volume, on his death, as a legacy to his successors, Yates and Wenger. Against Vedas and Upanishads, Brahmanas and Epics, he set the Sanskrit Bible. The whole number of completely translated and published versions of the sacred Scriptures which Carey sent forth was twenty-eight. Of these seven included the whole Bible, and twenty-one contained the books of the New Testament. Each translation has a history, a spiritual romance of its own. Each became almost immediately a silent but effectual missionary to the peoples of Asia, as well as the scholarly and literary pioneer of those later editions and versions from which the native churches of farther Asia derive the materials of their lively growth. The Ooriya version was almost the first to be undertaken after the Bengali, to which language it bears the same relation as rural Scotch to English, though it has a written character of its own. What is now the Orissa division of Bengal, separating it from Madras to the south-west, was added to the empire in 1803. This circumstance, and the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries of sun-worship and then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of the vaishnava cult of Jaganath and his car, which attracted and often slew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey to prepare at once for the press the Ooriya Bible. The chief pundit, Mritunjaya, skilled in both dialects, first adapted the Bengali version to the language of the Ooriyas, which was his own. Carey then took the manuscript, compared it with the original Greek, and corrected it verse by verse. The New Testament was ready in 1809, and the Old Testament in 1815, the whole in four volumes. Large editions were quickly bought up and circulated. These led to the establishment of the General Baptist Society's missionaries at Cuttak, the capital.