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IV. but he also consulted many learned Bengalee Pandits of the present day, and obtained the sanction of their authority in writing as to the entire correctness of his views. Poor and helpless Hindu widows have been most unjustly subjected to the unbearable hardships and tortures of single life, often from their very infancy, and deprived of legitimate happiness, by the force of a pernicious notion which originated either in the popular ignorance of our Shastras, or from the absence of a critical power so indispensable in weighing the apparently conflicting texts of different legislators. All this has been very successfully pointed out by the author. The translator of this work after having perused it in English thought it worth while to render it into Máráthí, and publish it for the benefit of his country. News paper-editors, pamphleteers, essayists and other writers whose minds are more or less bent upon the Social Reform of this coun try, have often ventilated the subject of this little treatise throughout the length and breadth of India. But they have almost with out exception looked to it from a differ point of view from the spirit of this w They looked at the absence of widow-marri among high cast Hindus as one of the gre social evils. They have honestly depia ow-marriage of the greatest
