Alfred Comyn Lyall, Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social (1882), p. 213
“

Sir Henry Maine's remarkable power of insight into the real meaning and connexions of archaic customs so alien to modern ideas as to be ordinarily incomprehensible, and his luminous generalizations upon the materials found scattered over these obscure fields of research, have greatly influenced local inquiries in India. He surveys and marks out the whole line of penetration into difficult and entangled subjects, and workers in the field are constantly verifying the extraordinary precision of their chief engineer's rapid alignments.

— Alfred Comyn Lyall

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Sir Henry Maine's remarkable power of insight into the real meaning and connexions of archaic customs so alien to modern ideas as to be ordinarily incomprehensible, and his luminous generalizations upon the materials found scattered over these obscure fields of research, have greatly influenced local inquiries in India. He surveys and marks out the whole line of penetration into difficult and entangled subjects, and workers in the field are constantly verifying the extraordinary precision of their chief engineer's rapid alignments." in the context of "Alfred Comyn Lyall, Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social (1882), p. 213" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: Wikiquote: "Henry James Sumner Maine" (Quotes about Maine) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Henry James Sumner Maine

About Henry James Sumner Maine

Sir Henry James Sumner Maine (15 August 1822 – 3 February 1888) was a British comparative jurist, historian and political proto-progressive nonetheless famous for his varied objections to Whig history.