The solution about to be proposed is quite new. By such Chinese specialists as may see it, if any, I confidently expect it to be derided. By the few Western students who concern themselves with this branch of inquiry, it will perhaps seem rather improper, rather improbable, and “rather interesting, all the same”.

In a former number of this journal I published a specimen translation of one of the Rasā'il of Junayd, as an announcement of my intention to make that famous personage the subject of a monograph. It will be useful at this stage to print the text and translation of what is one of the most interesting of the little treatises preserved in the Istanbul manuscript, both because of its contents, and also for the reason that it is the only work of Junayd for which we have a second authority. It is unfortunately true that the Istanbul manuscript, as the copyist himself is at pains to admit. is derived from a very faulty archetype, and with such an author as Junayd the work of emendation is necessarily attended with countless pitfalls. The Cairo manuscript of the Kitāb Dawā' al-arwāḥ exhibits roughly ninety variants as compared with the Istanbul manuscript, in the space of rather less than 2½ folios. In by far the majority of places the Istanbul manuscript appears to be the more correct.

That sūrah IX of the Qur'ān contains a proclamation made to the people at the pilgrimage is stated in v. 3 of the sūrah itself. As to how much of the sūrah was contained in the proclamation, there is, however, no agreement either in Moslem tradition or among European scholars. The tradition that the proclamation was made by 'Alī at the pilgrimage of the year IX is very generally accepted. The story is given by Ibn Hishām (ed. Wuestenfeld, p. 921): “When the Barā'a (sūrah IX) was revealed to the messenger of Allah, it was suggested to him that he should send it to Abū Bakr, who had already been sent to lead the pilgrimage. But he said: ‘No one shall act instead of me but a man of my own household.’ Thereupon he summoned 'Alī b. Abī Ṭālib, and said to him, ‘Go with this message from the beginning of the (sūrah) Barā'a, and proclaim among the people on the day of sacrifice, when they are gathered in Minā, that no unbeliever will enter Paradise, and that after this year no polytheist shall perform the pilgrimage, and no naked person shall make the circuit of the House.’” The story then proceeds to relate that 'Alī set out on the prophet's camel, overtook Abū Bakr and made the proclamation at the time and in the terms which the prophet had appointed.

The history of the musical scale in the Near and Middle East is full of perplexities. In my Histoire abrégée de I'échelle de la musique arabe, which I submitted to the Congress of Arabian Music at Cairo in 1932, and in my article Mūsīqī contributed to the Encyclopædia of Islām, I have endeavoured to show how this scale developed among the Arabs and Persians. In spite of the appearance of a gradual and natural evolution there are still many problems to be solved in the history of this scale, and one of them is the scale propounded by Ibn Sīnā, better known in the Occident as Avicenna.

I am not referring to the simile (and its fate) of the Jetawood and the faggots. That at least I have not overlooked, nor have others. Charles Eliot once wrote to us, that it seemed to imply the existence of a self that was other and more than body and mind (as the wood was there, and other, and more than the faggots). I remarked, Was it not a curious way of teaching the existence of a something (about which there might be a doubt), merely by implication ? I was then blind to two things: the tremendous emphasis on the immanence of Deity as ‘Self’ current in the lifetime of the ‘Buddha’ (rendering any assertion of It unnecessary); the decline in that emphasis by the time the Suttas came to be finally worded and canonized. To very few was awareness of this earlier and later constantly present. ‘Was?’ It is still true of most.

The following are translations from the cuneiform texts of the seventh century b.c. (from Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh) which deal with diseases of the feet and legs. The tablets are published in my Assyrian Medical Texts, and the translations are given here with various duplicates from elsewhere. Some have already been put before scholars by Ebeling (Archivf. Gesch. d. Medizin, xiii, xiv, and Keilschrifttexte Medidnischen Inhalts), but since his publication of them several “joins” have been made, so that, with the texthitherto untranslated and with the new knowledge subsequently acquired, a fresh edition will not be out of place. The connection of these medical texts dealing with diseases of the feet with those given in the series SA.GAL.LA (CT. xxiii, 1 ff.) will be obvious.

The Ariyapariyesana-Sutta in the Majjhima-Nikāya specifically mentions these two as the main points of Buddhism: (1) Paṭiccasamuppāda and (2) Nibbāna. The first point is the basic idea of Buddhism as a system of thought, and the second, the goal of Buddhism as a religion. The former is introduced as idappaccayatā, “causal relations.” The latter is introduced as sabbasaṅkhāra-samatho sabbūpadhipaṭinissaggo taṇhāhākkhayo virāgo nirodho, “the stilling of all plastic forces or the renunciation of all worldly ties, the extirpation of craving, passionlessness, peace.” The Sutta does not, however, offer any formula to interconnect the two.

In this Journal for January, 1937, Mr. A. F. Hemmy, from an exhaustive examination of the weights of silver punch-marked coins, “570 in the British Museum, 196 in Calcutta, and a single hoard of 108 coins (of which 103 are included) found near Patna, and now in the museum of that place; in all, 869 coins,” shows that (excluding a small number of the coins, 4 per cent only, which Mr. Hemmy considers have a different standard), the standard of weight of these coins is 52 grains, which multiplied by 4 is 208, and that the standard is therefore one-fourth of the revised principal unit of the Indus (Mohenjo-Daro) system of weights, viz. 13·625 gm. = 210·2 gr.