Of the monuments of medieval missionary work very few can surpass in interest the letters written from China by John of Monte Corvino, Archbishop of Khan-balig, and Andrew of Perugia, Bishop of Zaitun; arid many persons will be grateful to the Council of the Royal Asiatic Society for printing a more accurate text of these letters than has hitherto been available. The letters, together with most of what is known of the history of the missions to the Far East, of which the writers were members, are found in a single MS. which is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. The Librarians, whose extreme courtesy and kindness have made the following transcript possible, inform me that this MS. is now numbered “Latin 5006”, and that it dates from the first half of the fourteenth century. It contains 192 leaves, parchment, measuring Om. 20 × 0 m. 15. The credit of discovering the letters appears to belong to Luke Wadding, the voluminous historian of the Minor Friars, who was born at Waterford 16 October, 1588, and died 18 November, 1657, or to an unnamed friend of his.

Uddyotakara is well known as a Brāhmaṇa logician and author of a sub-commentary on Gotama's Nyāya- sūtra called the Nyāya-vārttika, in which he mentions two treatises on Logic called respectively the Vādavidhi and Vādavidhāna-ṭīkā.

The following translation is made from a MS. of Vakhtang's Code of Laws, purchased from a dealer in Tiflis in January, 1911, which is now the property of the Bodleian Library. The MS. is in good condition and bound in wooden boards covered with stamped leather. It is on yellow glazed paper, watermarked 1746, paged from 1 to 851; and then there follows, unpaged, a Code compiled by Prince David, son and heir of the last King of Georgia, which was hitherto unknown and bears that prince's autograph with the date “November 26, 1800” and a colophon by Gabriel, priest of Anchiskhati Church, dated 1805. The size of the page is 12 by 8 inches, of the text 8½ by 5½ inches. There are eighteen lines to the page and eight folios to the quire. A note on p. 57 says it was written by Ose Decanozishvili by the King's command in 1750, but this entry seems to have been made later in lighter ink and may only refer to the index. A remarkable feature of the MS. is that certain words (apparently those about which the scribe felt some doubt) are marked or ; this seems to show a conscientious transcription of an old original. The MS. begins with an alphabetical list of contents (paged 1–57), the earlier part of which (before ) had apparently been lost before the pages were numbered. Then comes the usual tabular index of subjects (pp. 62–136), with references to all the sections of the code for comparative purposes, so that the laws of Vakhtang, George, the Athabegs, and the Catholicos may be compared with each other, and with Greek, Armenian, and Mosaic legislation, at a glance.

In an article in the Indian Antiquary Mr. R. Shamasastry has made a new attempt to prove the existence in Vedic India in the period of the Saṃhitās and the Brāhmaṇas of a really elaborate calendar. He starts from the admitted existence of an intercalary month, which is referred to from the Ṛgveda onwards, and from the fact that in the Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda we find the Ekāṣṭakā, traditionally identified with the 8th day of the dark half of Māgha, treated as the commencement of the year. “Whether we will or no,” he concludes, “the fact cannot be denied that the idea of a thirteenth month, i.e. an intercalated month, could not have dawned upon the mind of the Vedic poets unless they had been quite familiar with the true lengths of several kinds of years.”

This record has been treated by M. Senart in the Journal Asiatique (sér. IX, vol. vii), 1896, i, 5 ff. (where he has described its provenance and appearance and has mentioned earlier notices of it), and by Professor Lüders in this Journal, 1909, pp. 645 ff. My treatment of it is based ou my own reading of the two facsimile plates published with M. Senart's paper, and I have to thank Dr. Fleet for various criticisms and suggestions. Where pages are cited in connexion with M. Senart's or Professor Lüders' readings, they mean the pages of their respective articles; and when quoting their readings of particular words, I distinguish the readings by adding S or L, using these letters for the sake of brevity.

To students of Buddhism and Comparative Religion desirous of knowing Buddha's own views and teaching from his own words, it is extremely disconcerting to find that the Pāli Canon can no longer be regarded as the actual “Word” and Doctrine of Buddha himself. It has been conclusively established by the researches of Kern, Minayef, Senart, Feer, Poussin, Lefmann, Winternitz, R. O. Franke, and others (including the writer) that the Pāli Canon is a mosaic of material belonging to different ages and stages in the development of Buddhism; and that the words and theories put into the mouth of Buddha therein are largely the composition of monks who lived several centuries after Buddha's death, and considerably later than was estimated by Professor H. Oldenberg. Embedded thus in this mass of heterogeneous material, with no outstanding distinctive marks, it seems almost hopeless to confidently detect and dig out therefrom the pieces containing unequivocally the true Buddha-Word.

It is my intention to trace the history and evolution of the dome in Persia from the earliest times to the present day; and I hope to show at the same time the very important part played by Persia in the evolution of domed construction, which I believe has never been pointed out before. Before I can do this, however, I must first briefly review the dome in antiquity.

The low ebb of sinological studies in this country is all too clearly indicated by the fact that the present text is actually the first to be published out of the enormous mass of Chinese manuscripts brought home by Sir Aurel Stein tive years ago. It is not altogether unbefitting, however, that the place of honour should be accorded to a brochure giving some account of the Tunhuang district, and including a description of the famous grottos where the whole collection of manuscripts was found. The Tun Huang Lu is indeed tantalizingly brief, consisting as it does of only 893 characters all told. But within that small compass it touches on many interesting points, the proper discussion of which would require more space than can be given to them here; and one passage, at least, throws a flood of light 011 a vexed question of topography which has never yet been solved. It is worth reading, in any case, as a short summary of what was known about this remote but highly important region towards the close of the T'ang dynasty. My reasons for assigning the text to this period are duly set forth in the accompanying notes. The handwriting is bold, and for the most part clear enough. A few characters, however, are to be found which the penman has allowed to lapse into “grassiness”—the especial bane of every foreign student. These I have deciphered to the best of my ability, but in the lack of any assistance from native or other experts I cannot feel quite certain of the correctness of my readings. As regards the style of the document, its terseness frequently verges on obscurity, and the punctuation (omitted as in nearly all Chinese MSS.) has been by no means easy to supply in certain passages.