Before beginning the actual course of lectures which I have undertaken to deliver before you for the Stephanos Nirmalendu Ghosh foundation, I think it will interest you if, by way of personal introduction, I make a few statements about my relations to India as a country and to the study of India's ancient language and literature. Though both my father and my mother were natives of the North of Scotland, at the western geographical limit of the Indo-European nations, I myself was born in the north-east of India, their oriental frontier. For I first saw the light at Mozuffarpur in Tirhut more than sixty years ago. All the impressions and recollections of the first seven years of my life go back to Indian scenes, with Indian trees, fruits, and flowers, Indian animals, birds, and reptiles, Indian bungalows, camps, and bazaars, and lastly many kind Indian servants. I remember the Himalaya, the Ganges and its tributary the Gandak, Pusa (now an Agricultural College), Sonpur, Buxar, Patna, Mussoorie, and finally Calcutta, to which I came down the Ganges with my parents in a houseboat. I have still a vivid recollection of a scene at Calcutta, when I fell into a tank while helping another boy to push off the model of a sailing ship from one of the steps leading down to the water. My last recollection of India from my childhood is of the day on which my father, who was an officer in the Army, took leave of us on board a large sailing ship named the Agamemnon, in the Hooghly, before we started on the voyage to London. This parting scene has always remained in my memory as illustrating a sad phase of the life of Europeans in India. I may add that my mother had seven brothers and sisters in India, most of them at the same time as herself; and that my father and three uncles lie buried in Indian soil. Thus you see that as far as family ties are concerned my early connexion with India was very intimate. But later on, it became even closer intellectually, for in that sense it has lasted forty-seven years. During the six years before I came up to Oxford as an under- graduate, I was educated at the public school and the University of Göttingen in Germany. As soon as I matriculated at Göttingen early in 1875, I began the study of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology under Professor Theodore Benfer, one of the four great pioneers of Vedic studies in Europe, and the editor in 1818 of the Samaveda, the first of the four Vedas to be critically published in its entirety. After coming up to Oxford in 1876, I continued my Sanskrit studies under Professor Monier Williams and gained the Boden Sanskrit Scholarship. While still an undergraduate I taught Sanskrit to Bunyiu Nanjio, the first Japanese to study Sanskrit in modern times, and now a noted Buddhist preacher in Japan. When I had taken my degree at Oxford, I continued my Vedic studies under the guidance of Professor Max Müller, the first editor of the Rigveda, and began preparing to publish an edition of the Sarranukramanı an early Index to the RV. This came out in 1886. I also took the opportunity of deepening my Vedic knowledge under the stimulus of Professor Roth at the University of Tübingen in Germany.