The language specimen here reproduced was brought in to me while in the Darjeeling neighbourhood in 1931, having been taken down in the recently revived Limbu alphabet by an educated Limbu, by name Iman Singha Chemjong, direct from the dictation of the speaker himself. Though pressure of work on other languages of the “pronominalized” group prevented my seeing the actual speaker, who Was off in another part of the hills, there is no difficulty in placing the dialect with its nearest relatives in the Linguistic Survey. It is, without doubt, a form of Rungchhēnbūng, and a near relative of Wāling. To the former the Linguistic Survey was able to devote, through lack of material, only some two pages, to the latter, for the same reason about a page and a half, no specimen being available in either case. I, therefore, give what follows as a small supplement to our knowledge of this little-known form of speech.

As the Swat valley, and neighbourhood, which constitute the principal portion of the old province of Udyāna, have hitherto been inaccessible for archæological research, the following rough notes (made during the little time at my disposal as Chief Political Officer with the Chitral Relief Force, and lately as Political Officer for Dir and Swat) may induce others better qualified to devote some attention to this interesting neighbourhood. They are principally connected with the travels of the Chinese pilgrim Huan Tsiang, as given in Beal's “Buddhist Records of the Western World.”

Iron ore is found chiefly in the north-west quarter of the Peninsula. The result of my inquiries gives the number of six foundries working at one time, during the fair season, throughout the province, and two or three more occasionally. The extent to which the metal is manufactured will be given in the body of this Report. I have visited only two foundries, those at Ranawao and Ranpoor in the Ranas and Jam's Talookas respectively; but I understand a description of one applies alike to all, their construction being rude and simple.

Encouraged by the reception of my former paper on Bihārī Folk-Songs, I now lay before the Society a further set of similar ones, in the same dialect of the Bihārī language,— the Bhoj'pūrī.

Hajjī Khalīfa gives the pedigree of Shanfarà in the following manner: Shanfarà , son of Aws , son of Hujru-'l-Hinwu , son of Azd , son of Gawth , son of Zayd , son of Kahlān , son of Saba' .

In my Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library (pp. 69–86) I described, at what may have seemed rather inordinate length, a work called the Jāvidān-i-Kabīr, which aroused my interest in the highest degree. The interest of this work, as I there pointed out, is twofold: it embodies very remarkable doctrines, apparently akin to those of the Isma'īlīs or Shī'ites of the “Sect of the Seven”; and considerable portions of it are written in a peculiar dialect of Persian which certainly merits a fuller study. Concerning the author of this work, Faẓlu'llāh b. Abī Muḥammad of Tabrīz, called “al-Ḥurūfī,” we know little (except what may be gleaned from his writings) beyond what is contained in the brief notice of Ibn Ḥajar al-'Asqalānī (d. a.h. 852), cited by Flügel at pp. vii–viii of the preface to the second volume of his edition of Hājī Khalfa. “Faẓlu'llāh,” says Ibn Ḥajar, “the son of Abū Muḥammad of Tabrīz, was one of those innovators who subject themselves to ascetic discipline. Imbued with heretical doctrine, he finally produced the sect known as the Ḥurūfīs [from ‘Letters’] pretending that the Letters [of the alphabet] were metamorphoses of men, together with many other idle and baseless fancies. He invited the Amīr Tīmūr the Lame [Tamerlane] to adopt his heresies, but he desired to slay him. And this came to the knowledge of his son (with whom he had sought refuge), and he struck off his head with his own hand.

The astronomical theory of Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) had similar difficulties in winning recognition and acceptance by the contemporary astronomers in China as it had in Europe. The conflict of the traditional astronomies of both cultures, the contrast between the cosmologico-philosophical ideas established during many centuries and the new theory of the solar system, all that was a basis not only for scientific but also for religious disagreement. The conservative attitude of the Church, rigorously interpreted to the disadvantage of the Copernican theory, went with the Christian missionaries to China.

I have two reasons for writing this paper. The first is that, while I have occasionally heard the word Nostratic, I have never had a clear idea what it meant, and I suspect that most readers of this Journal are in a similar position. The second is that I have recently received from a colleague in Moscow a book just published there entitled “An attempt to compare the Nostratic languages” (Opyt sravneniya nostraticheskikh yazykov) which defines the term, gives a history of the origin and development of the Nostratic theory, and marshals a great deal of evidence in support of it. The author, V. M. Illich-Svitych, died in 1964, and the first part of his book, which was perhaps never finished, has now been published, with an introduction, notes, and some supplementary matter, by his friend and colleague, V. A. Dybo. This was Illich-Svitych's only major work, but the bibliography (p. 74; this and similar references are to pages in the book) lists also six articles by him in various learned journals. The first feeling of any reader of the book must be utter astonishment at the amount of sheer hard detailed work which he packed into a short life of no more than 32 years.

The religion of the Hindus of the Dekkan seems to me to consist of four constituent parts; 1st. Pure Brahmanism, as contained in the Vedas and Puranas; 2nd. An ante-Brahmanical worship, consisting in the adoration of painted stones, which are not acknowledged as objects of worship by the Brahmans, but considered as the representatives of demons; 3d. Buddhism, or that modification of it which subsists among the Jains; and under which heads falls the worship of the Pandharpur Vitthoba. 4. A local superstition based on Brahmanism, and consisting of the worship of remarkable persons who have arisen in the Maratha country in times comparatively modern. It is to these modern local deities that I now solicit attention.

“The tendencies of Apabhraṃśa in phonetics and grammar help to bridge the gap between typical Prakrit and the modern languages.” A. Woolner expressed this view in 1928 when comparatively few Apabhraṃśa texts had been published and the remarkable continuity of the Indo-Aryan languages was accepted as a fact. Since then their general pattern of development, which appeared with simple clarity to Woolner, has often been obscured by the wealth of linguistic material of the Middle Indo-Aryan period that has come to light.

The Fárs-Námeh-i-Náṣirí (lith. Tihrán 1313/1895–6) contains much valuable information regarding the various nomad tribes of the province.

When we consider the progress made by comparative Indo-European philology, we can only wonder that even after the discovery of Assyrian, which undoubtedly represents the Sanskrit of the Semitic languages, no attempt has been made to form a comparative Semitic grammar. Assyrian has hitherto been regarded as at most useful for the explanation of certain questions of Hebrew lexicography; as for the morphology of the Semitic tongues, scholars have been content with simply stating the analogies which exist between Assyrian and the allied languages. The cause of this lies mainly in the fact that Assyrian is regarded as a corrupt branch of the Semitic family of speech; and much that is peculiar in its structure, the preservation of which really implies the highest antiquity, is treated as so many new formations, so that the possibility of properly utilizing Assyrian grammatical forms for the explanation of Semitic grammar is at the outset taken away. Hence, as long as such thoroughly perverse views are not given up, a scientific philology of the Semitic languages can never take its place by the side of that of the Indo-European languages.

Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṣṭrī is the name of a particular script used in Afghanistan, the Punjab, and portions of Central Asia from the fourth or fifth centuries before Christ to the third or fourth centuries of the Christian era. In the third or fourth centuries a.d. it gradually went out of use, the place being taken by one or more forms of the mediaeval Brāhmī. In the eighteenth century the earlier generation of epigraphists and archæologists used to call this script “Bactrian”, “Indo-Bactrian”, “Bactro-Pali”, “Ariano-Pali”, etc. Then it was identified with the Kharoṣṭhī or Kharoṭṭhī lipi, on the evidence of the Fa-wan-shu-lin. The Chinese work describes the “ass-lip” (Kham-oṣṭha in Sanskrit) script, invented by one Kharoṣṭha, in which the writing ran from the right to left. This identification, proposed by George Bühler, has since met with general acceptance.

The caliphate of Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (105–25/724–43) was undoubtedly one of the most important periods in early Islamic history, and as witness to the history of this era a source of paramount importance is certainly the Ta'rīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk of al-Ṭabarī. This in itself makes the publication of Volume xxv of the English translation of this work by Dr Khalid Yahya Blankinship, covering all but the last five years of Hishām's long reign, a matter of special interest to historians of the eastern lands of Islam. The reader will immediately notice that al-Ṭabarī devotes the bulk of his narrative for this period to events in Khurāsān and Transoxania, specifically, to the Umayyad campaigns there and hostilities with the Türgish khāqān Sü-lü Čur. In the course of this narrative one finds not only a wealth of information on military matters, but also much valuable data on the customs of the western Turks and life in Central Asia in general. The author's reasons for giving his work such a markedly eastern emphasis at this point are not unrelated to a desire, as Blankinship observes, to set forth the background for the 'Abbāsid revolution. But most of what al-Ṭabarī reports for this period is in fact not of immediate relevance to the advent of the 'Abbāsids, and indeed, the subject of 'Abbāsid propaganda activities hardly seems to be a prominent one in this volume.