The object in collecting and translating the many inscriptions to be met with in India, is, as Mr. Wathen very justly observes in his letter to the Secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, to elucidate the history of India previous to the Muhammedan conquest. Of that history, but little is yet known: that little to the few only who have devoted the greater part of their lives to this research, and each of those few possessing perhaps a part only of that information which, if combined and moulded into a whole, might, at no distant day, supply this desideratum in our knowledge of the East, without which no accurate notion can be formed of the true character of ancient India, as to its modes of government, laws, and usages