In submitting these notices to the attention of the Society, the object is to bring under its view the internal revenue economy of a Hindu village that has never been under the direct control of any European officer of the East-India Company, in order to exhibit a fair specimen of ancient usages in the south of India, and to shew with accuracy, the proportion of the produce of the soil customarily taken in kind, in latter times, as land revenue, the rights of the parties paying revenue, and those of the individual who, by grant from the sovereign, is entitled to collect that revenue.

The composition of an Indian court of justice, conformably with the ancient Hindu institutions, being very imperfectly understood, and many erroneous notions having become prevalent on this subject, it appears to deserve a more full investigation than it has yet undergone; and, with this view, I submit to the Society the result of a careful perusal of original authorities of Hindu law relating to that point.

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.

I am to-day at Ser Yazd, eight farsakhs south of Yazd, on my road to Kennan…. As I suppose the Gabrs interest you most, I will begin my rambling letter with them. I heard at Shiraz, where there are occasionally a few Gabr shopkeepers, that in Kermán there are only a few illiterate Gabrs; so when I at Darebjard heard that the road lies for six days through a complete desert, without any habitation, or the least cultivation, I determined to go straight to Yazd, which would be passing over ground that had been travelled by few or no Europeans before. I found at least on my map many places laid down wrong, even Yazd; and I am now on the road to Kermán, only on account of my having heard at Yazd, that though there are there only one hundred houses, (or about four or five hundred Gabrs), still they have from olden time a good many books, far more than there are in Yazd; whether it be true or not, I shall tell you by and bye.

There are few facts in Eastern history better authenticated than the invasion of India by Mahmúd of Ghizni: the details of his sack of Pattan Somnath have been narrated, in some detail, even by the accurate Gibbon, and a few particulars, therefore, regarding the present condition of this far-famed temple and city, collected in October, 1830, may not be unacceptable to the Society.

The following account of the early relations between the countries east and west of the Halys is the result of a journey made from Smyrna by the Hermus valley, Doghanlu, Angora, Boghaz Keui, and Euyuk to Sivas (May 13 to June 29, 1881), on which Col. Sir Charles Wilson kindly invited me to accompany him. The Roman roads of the district were a frequent topic of conversation; and the knowledge of the routes, on which this article rests, has been gained from his skill. I afterwards found that the information I had thus acquired from Mm of the Roman roadsystem had an important bearing on the early history of these countries.

The Book of Zambasta is not without importance in the history of Buddhist studies. We know that Khotan was a major centre of Mahāyāna studies when Fa-hsien visited it about a.d. 400 on his way to India, and it had expanded in this direction when Hsüan-tsang in the 7th century spent several months in Khotan on his way back from India to China. Khotan was, if not the cradle, at any rate the stronghold of the Mahāyānist movement. We know of its importance in the transmission of Buddhist teaching to the East. Even the well-known term Zen represents Sanskrit dhyāna “meditation” only through the intermediacy of a Prakrit form such as the Khotanese loan-word jāna. In the Chinese Tripiṭaka we have translations made by Khotanese missionaries such as Devaprajña, Śikṣānanda, and Śīladharma. In the 5th century a certain marquis of An iang hou journeyed to Khotan in his youth to study the Dhyāna. A Chinese catalogue finished in a.d. 515 tells how eight Chinese monks came to Khotan and there heard the stories that later they made into the well-known collection “The Sūtra of the Wise man and the Fool”. The famous monk Jinagupta, who taught the Turks about Buddhist doctrines in the 6th century, had studied in Khotan for many years.

It has often struck me how helpless European students are when they are in search of books published in India. These books are so cheap, and their demand in Europe is so limited, that it does not pay Indian publishers to have agents for their sale here. In addition to this, students have no means of knowing what works are published in India; and even if they knew their names, that is no criterion of the value of their contents. I therefore put down the following notes regarding books which I myself have found useful in studying Hindī, in the hope that they may be acceptable to my fellowstudents.

Geographical Position.—About nine miles inland of Pondicherry on the Coromandel coast, Lat. 11° 56′ N., are beds of limestone rising in gentle undulations, and running in a S.E. by E. direction, almost parallel with the coast, for a distance, as far as I was able to trace, of about four or fire miles. Of these strata no detailed account had been published up to the date of my visit in March, 1840. They are seen to crop out near the villages of Sydapett, Carassoo, Coolypett, and Vurdavoor, from a superincumbent tertiary lateritic grit imbedding large quantities of silicified wood, and of which a description has been given by Lieutenant Warren: who has, however, overlooked the fossil limestone. The beds of the latter dip very slightly easterly. The greater part of the surface of the limestone is concealed by the soil and vegetation. A short distance further towards the west it is again covered by beds of the silicified wood deposit, and both are underlaid by plutonic and hypogene rocks, which crop out near the village of Trivicary, and form the western boundary of the fossiliferous beds. Rolled and angular fragments of the hypogene rocks are scattered here and there over the limestone, as well as fragments from the silicified wood beds, and from the limestone itself; the surface of the latter has evidently been exposed by the denudation of the superincumbent beds. It appears in surface-worn tables traversed by innumerable fissures.

There are few objects of antiquarian research that have attracted more attention from the learned in Europe, than the history and purposes of the Cave Temples of India, but if we except the still unexplained antiquities of Mexico, I know none regarding which so little that is satisfactory has been elicited, or about which so many, and such discordant opinions exist: and while the age of every building of Greece and Rome is known with the utmost precision, and the dates of even the Egyptian monuments ascertained with almost as much certainty as those of mediæval cathedrals, still all in India is darkness and uncertainty, and there is scarcely a work on architecture published, or lecture read, which does not commence by a comparison between the styles of India and Egypt, and after pointing out a similarity which seems to be an established point of faith in Europe, though in reality no two styles are more discordant, the author generally proceeds to doubt which is the more ancient of the two, and in most cases ascribes the palm of antiquity to the Indian as the prototype. Yet, in truth, Egypt had ceased to be a Nation before the earliest of the cave temples was excavated, and if we except the copies of earlier structures erected by the Ptolemies and Cæsars, there is nothing on the banks of the Nile which does not belong to a different and far more ancient epoch than anything in India.

Although the Wellcome Collection of Hebraica does not constitute one of the larger and more distinguished collections of oriental material in the Wellcome Institute, it nevertheless comprises a number of important manuscripts along with early printed books representative of several sixteenth and seventeenth-century Hebrew presses. One of these is a fragment of a larger work printed in Constantinople in 1505 at the press of David and Samuel Nahmias. It is the second earliest example of printing in Turkey, the first also coming from the press of the Nahmias brothers.

The Kathmandu valley in the seventeenth century was very prosperous, the bulk of its wealth derived from the trade which flowed through the valley between Tibet and the Indian plains. The ancient urban centres of the valley, Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur had emerged early in the century as three separate kingdoms. The tradition of jointrulership, whereby rule of each city-state was shared between branches of the ruling Malla dynasty had collapsed. The three kingdoms were engaged in constant rivalry which intermittently spilt over into open hostility and which consumed much of their energy and wealth. Yet it was also this rivalry which stimulated an era of generous royal patronage of the priesthood and the sponsoring of major pūjās and religious festivals, together with the building of new palaces and temples dedicated to the rulers' favourite deities. Support was extended not only to the artists commissioned to decorate the palaces and shrines, but also to poets, writers and musicians who found their work being encouraged, particularly when Nepalese court life underwent something of a renaissance under Mithila influence. This activity reached a peak during the reign of the enlightened and cultured King Pratapamalla of Kathmandu (1641–74), and under that of his contemporary and rival, King Jagatprakas'amalla of Bhaktapur (1643–72).

During 1937–38, with my wife's tireless co-operation, I archæologically explored the Malay States of Kedah, Perak, and Johore, with the primary object of obtaining data on the spread of Indian civilization in South-East Asia. The full report, including that of the systematic excavation of many sites of the “Hindu period” in Kedah, was published in JRASMB, vol. xviii, part 1, 1940, with 89 plates and 15 figures. Subsequently we excavated one or two other sites in Kedah and also explored Province Wellesley. The report of this supplementary work, delayed by the war, will shortly appear in JRASMB. The object of the present paper is to give a summary of our main Malayan results in the sphere of cultural history, as well as to point out some wider implications in conjunction with my earlier excavations in Siam, which these Malayan investigations do much to complete and illuminate.