With the exhaustless energy which marked his whole life, Alexander Duff spent the hottest and wettest period of the Bengal year, the six weeks from the end of May to the middle of July, in preliminary inquiries. From early morning till latest eve he visited every missionary and mission station in and around Calcutta, from the southern villages on the skirts of the malarious Soonderbun forests to the older settlements of the Dutch at Chinsurah and the Danes at Serampore. There was not a school which he did not inspect; not one of those thatched bamboo and wickerwork chapels, in which apostolic men like Lacroix preached night and morning in Bengalee to the passersby in the crowded thoroughfares of the capital, in which he did not spend hours noting the people and the preaching alike. For he had at once begun that study of the vernacular without which half his knowledge of and sympathy with the natives must have been lost. He was especially careful to visit in detail representative rural villages, that he might satisfy himself and the committee. From such minute investigations, and from frequent conferences with the more experienced men already in the field, he arrived at two conclusions. These were, that Calcutta itself must be the scene of his earliest and principal efforts, from which he could best operate on the interior; and that the method of his operations must be different from that of all his predecessors in India.