Christianity will cure. He was the first to apply in India that
system of savings banks which the Government has of late sought to
encourage.

At a time when the English and even Scottish universities denied
their honorary degrees to all British subjects who were not of the
established churches, Brown University, in the United
States--Judson's--spontaneously sent Carey the diploma of Doctor of
Divinity. That was in the year 1807. In 1823 he was elected a
corresponding member of the Horticultural Society of London, a
member of the Geological Society, and a Fellow of the Linnæan
Society. To him the latter year was ever memorable, not for such
honours which he had not sought, but for a flood of the Damoodar
river, which, overflowing its embankments and desolating the whole
country between it and the Hoogli, submerged his garden and the
mission grounds with three feet of water, swept away the botanic
treasures or buried them under sand, and destroyed his own house.
Carey was lying in bed at the time, under an apparently fatal fever
following dislocation of the hip-joint. He had lost his footing
when stepping from his boat. Surgical science was then less equal
to such a case than it is now, and for nine days he suffered agony,
which on the tenth resulted in fever. When hurriedly carried out of
his tottering house, which in a few hours was scoured away by the
rush of the torrent into a hole fifty feet deep, his first thought
was of his garden. For six months he used crutches, but long before
he could put foot to the ground he was carefully borne all over the
scene of desolation. His noble collection of exotic plants,
unmatched in Asia save in the Company's garden, was gone. His
scientific arrangement of orders and families was obliterated. It
seemed as if the fine barren sand of the mountain torrent would make