Laudator Temporis Acti

Alfred J. Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. X (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 16-17 (footnotes omitted):

Professor H.W. Bailey (natus A.D. 1899), a philologist of world-wide renown who in A.D. 1952 was the Professor of Sanskrit in the University of Cambridge, had awoken to consciousness as a child on a farm in Western Australia; and it would be hard to think of a more unpromising environment than this for producing a savant in the field of Oriental languages. The virgin soil of a recently colonized terra nullius exhaled no folk-lore to play the part of those local legends that had put Heinrich Schliemann, in his Varangian village, on the track of buried treasure; but the local human environment in Western Australia in the first decade of the twentieth century of the Christian Era did provide Harold Walter Bailey with the equivalent of the Universal History that had given the decisive turn to Heinrich Schliemann's life when it had come into Schliemann's hands on Christmas Day, 1829. The books that descended from Heaven upon the boy on the West Australian farm were 'a set of seven volumes of an encyclopaedia (eagerly devoured) and four other volumes with lessons in French, Latin, German, Greek, Italian, and Spanish. Later came Arabic and Persian, out of which Persian took the lead (joined later to Sanskrit)'.

This was the trove that set Bailey's curiosity on fire; and in A.D. 1943 the present writer induced the modest scholar to describe to him how his family used to watch him, with a benign but whimsical gaze, while, during the noonday rest from their common labours in the field, he would be conning his Avestan grammar in the shade of an Antipodean haystack. By the time when he was approaching the age to matriculate at a university, the young student of Oriental languages had become aware that he had reached the limit of what he could teach himself, unaided, out of the books on which he could lay hands. What was the next step? At the University of Western Australia at this date there was no provision for Oriental studies; for help in these, the would-be student would have to go on to Western Europe or to North America. So Bailey taught himself Latin and Greek; took these as his subjects at his own university; won a scholarship at the University of Western Australia to take him to the University of Oxford; and found at Oxford the help that he needed in order to complete his mastery of Oriental languages.

Yet even Cambridge, England, could not provide this Australian philologist with a chair specifically allocated to the Khotanese language, akin to Persian and to Sanskrit, which had been introduced into the Tarim Basin by the Sakas and which, while H.W. Bailey was studying Avestan under his haystack in Western Australia, had been recovered from oblivion by the labours of a series of Western pioneers in the Tarim Basin, culminating in the Hungarian-British archaeologist-explorer Sir Aurel Stein's trove of religious and secular literature in known and still all but unknown languages, on which this path-finder had lighted in May 1907 in a Taoist shrine at Ch'ien Fo-tung ('the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas'), near Tun-huang in the Su-lo-ho Basin, 'a natural corridor' leading from North-Western China into Central Asia, at the Western terminus of the former limes of a Sinic universal state; and Khotanese and Tokharian were the fields in which Bailey, in the next stage of his intellectual career, was to give the most impressive demonstrations of his prowess in advancing the frontiers of philological knowledge.