When, in the beginning of last May, I visited Professor Sir E. Denison Ross, of Oriental Studies, he showed me a book entitled Ch'ao hsien Kuan i yu. It was of great interest to me, as I had not seen it before, and T asked permission to examine it. He willingly complied with my request, but at the same time asked me to write some explanatory notes on the book. Being only on a visit to the country, I am unable to refer to Corean books of reference, and for the explanations, etc., which follow, can only trust to my memory.

Besides the well-known Vālmīki-rāmâyaṇa, three other Sanskrit poems entitled “Rāmâyaṇa” are current in northern India, and are highly esteemed. They are (1) the Yōga-vāsiṣṭha-mahārāmâyaṇa, (2) the Adhyātma-rāmâyaṇa, and (3) the Adbhuta-rāmâyaṇa. Of these the first and the last claim to have been composed by no less a person than Vālmīki himself; but the Adhyātma-rāmâyaṇa forms a section of the Brahmâṇḍa-purāṇa, and does not suggest any pretension to his authorship.

We know that in the Pali and Jain scriptures we find, as we do not find in other early Indian scriptures, the triplet: action of mind, action of word, action of body. We know that the triplet is a feature in the ancient Persian thought which we associate with the work of Zarathustra. And we may or we may not have noted as significant, how three great founders of creeds which were primarily concerned with the importance of man's will and man's actions or conduct, should be credited with the wording of this triplet, while the intermediate development in India of the creeds of the rite and the ritual, the piiest and the sacrifice, leftthe triplet unstressed. When this threefold wording of thought, word, and deed as modes of action (kamma) came into use in Buddhist teaching we do not know. It does not appear everywhere in the Pali scriptures. In many books it scarcely appears at all. It attains its chief prominence in the fourth, or Anguttara Nikāya. But wherever it does occur, it occurs as an unquestioned and accepted way of wording.

In a previous number of the Bulletin, I submitted a translation of a little known work describing the history of the Mission of the Society of Jesus in Persia. I now propose to supplement this history by giving a short abstract, and translation of a part, of an interesting work which appeared in 1681, bearing on the earlier and wider activities of the Society in the East, including Persia.

There forms of the Marāthi passive are found in the Jñāneśvarī or Jñānadevī, a commentary on the Bhagavadagīāa in. the ovī metre, written by the poet Jñāneśvara or Jñanadeva in the year A.D. 1290. These may be termed the “ ij ”, “ p ”, and “ pij ” forms. The “ ij ” form is the one most frequently employed. It occurs on almost every page and frequently more than once on the same page. Its derivation has been discussed by Beames, Bloch, Grierson, and others. It is employed with any verb, whether used transitively or intransitively. The subject of the sentence, if expressed, is put into the instrumental case. The object is generally in the nominative (subjective), but the dative also occurs, especially where there are two objects. The use of the dative is especially noticeable when the construction with the postposition “ with reference to” is employed. eventually became the modern “ lā, ” termination of the dative. In this connexion the use of the dative in the Karmaṇi construction may be noticed. The Aorist (old Present) is the tense most frequently employed and is often used as an Imperative, to which the precative termination “ o ” is added, e.g. audhārijo “ let it be heard by you ” (cf. the je, jo forms of the GujarātI honorific Imperative). Several examples of the future (jel, jail, jatīl) and past tenses (jele, jelẽ) occur. This form of the passive does not occur in the modern language, except in the case of dīje “let it be given” and kīje “ let it be done” in formal documents, and of mhaṇaje “let it be said”, “that is to say”, “then”, and pāhije “it is necessary”, “must”. In the Jñāneśvarī pāhije generally means “it is seen”, “let it be seen” (e.g. in xi, 594), but the extended use in the sense of “it is necessary” occurs very occasionally (e.g. x, 261).

On page 93 of his Grammar Taylor divides prepositions, or more strictly speaking, postpositions, into five classes, and speaks of ne prepositions as those which govern the preceding noun or pronoun in the locatival genitive, masculine or neuter. In paragraph 97 a list of 141 prepositions is given. Of the 27, which take the ne construction, 15 may be explained as above, but in some instances, e.g. Kārane, jore, dvāre, and yoge, the case may well be the instrumental, if the meaning of the postposition be taken into account. They are the following:—arthe “ with a view to ”, Kāje “ for ”, in order to, Kārane, jore “ on account of”, thekāne, badale “ in place of”, dvāre “ by way of ”, padakhe “ near ”, mukdbale “ in comparison with”, mokhare “ in front of“, yoge ” by means of“, lekhe “ at the rate of”, sāte “ in exchange for”, sthale, sthāne “ in place of ”. These are all locatives, and in some cases possibly instrumentals of nouns still in use and signifying the idea conveyed by the corresponding postposition. But tulya and sam “equal to” are adjectives, while lagto “pertaining to” and pharto “surrounding” are declinable participles or participial adjectives. The ne, which precedes them, is not the locative of the genitive, but the dative (objective) case ending.

The Pahlavi text which has been recently re-edited and translated by J. M. Unvala, entitled Drakht i Asurik, has not to my knowledge received any attention from Assyriologists. In spite of the difficulties entailed in dealing with a province of which I am wholly ignorant, I have been tempted to put some suggestions on paper in the hope that the meaning of this little-known text may be viewed in a fresh relation.

(a) (1) Considerable confusion exists as regards the Statical Participles.

On page 174 of his Grammar, Platts states: “ Rem. The so-called Staticals differ from Conthraatives in denoting temporary or accidental state. The two forms are clearly distinguished in most native grammars, but are strangely misunderstood by European grammarians, who teach that the participle is inflected in Staticals and not inflected in Continuatives! Now, the fact is that it is just to indicate duration or continuity (and occasionally a habitual state) that the particle (sic) or verbal adjective is changed into an adverb and inflected. This is evident from such forms as chalte chalte thak gayā, ‘ I wearied through much or continued walking …,’ ”

On the occasion of a wedding, a pūjā, or any other festival, it is quite a customary thing for a well-to-do man in Bengal to engage a kaihak or a pañchāli or yātrā party to give a performance or a series of performances in the courtyard of his house, where a considerable portion of the population of the village assembles as an audience, and sits, often right through the night, listening to song and speech, dialogue and story. It is for the most part by means of such performances that a knowledge of the myths and traditions of Hinduism is preserved in the minds of the illiterate mass of the population of Bengal.

I. Truth is the fundamental attribute of the Saint.

II. It is said, “Great is the Principle of Origin indicated by Ch'ien, from it all things derive their beginning”; here Truth is presented to us as it is at its source.

III. It is said, “It is the law of Ch'ien, by its changes and transformations to impart the Nature and Decree in their perfection to each individual thing”; here Truth is presented to us as it is in its accomplishment.

IV. Thus Truth, in its beginning and in its consummation, is the pure and spotless, and the supremely good.

Music is the natural expression of man's feelings. It expresses the sublime and beautiful inherent in man. It comes spontaneously to all persons in all conditions at all times and in all countries. “The very fact of musical utterance,” says Sir Hubert Parry, “implies a genuine expansion of the nature of the human being and is in a varying degree a trustworthy revelatioD of the particular likings, tastes, and sensibilities of the being that gives vent to it.”

The stories published in this issue of the Bulletin are from the same stock as the tale of Suto and Tato given in Vol. III, Part I, which I had the good fortune to publish with the most kind help of the late Major E. B. Soane. whose premature death we have to deplore so deeply. The Kurdish in which our stories are written may be termed the Central dialect of the Northern group according to E. B. Soane's classification. The author, Molla Said Kazi of Kurdistan, was a learned Kurd from Nahri, the capital of Shamsdinan. Indeed, we see in the text some characteristics which can only be met with in the Northern group, such as the plural in īd, the termination rā, the preposition zhe (from), which is only used in the Northern group and replaces la which has the same value in the Southern group; and the preterite hābū (he was), which only extends as far south as Rawandiz, whose dialect is decisively Southern. But on the other hand, there are some peculiarities which lead one to think that this Shamsdinan dialect is not a pure Northern group dialect, but may present a transition to the Southern group. For example this dialect uses indifferently as the genitive particle ä and ī it also makes indiscriminate use of the preposition zhe or la. These, of course, are only faint signs, but one can hope that further careful investigations may furnish other proofs. Anyhow, we must remember that Molla Said was born in the Nahia of Girdi, i.e. the most southward part of this qazā.

By the courtesy of the Commissioner for the Nigerian Section of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, I was able to make the following notes on Kanuri, after about a dozen sittings with a native of Kano, in 1924, and a few more in 1925. The native, whose name is Arigana, spoke no English other than a few isolated words such as yes, good morning, come, sit, etc. I knew no Kanuri at all, nor Hausa, which he could also speak. Mr. Nicholson, who was in charge of the natives in 1924, explained to Arigana what I wanted, and I worked on the following plan. I had Kanuri Readings, by P. Askell Benton, and Koelle's Grammar of Kanuri. In the first of these books several stories are written in a Koman script, with a word for word and a free translation, a Kanuri-English and English-Kanuri vocabulary, the latter a particularly full one. Between the summers of 1924 and 1925 I also used Noël's Petit Manuel de Francais-Kanuri and von Duisberg's Kanuri-Sprache.

The question concerning the location of the original home of the Indo-Europeans—by which name is designated, not a certain race or people of which no traces have so far been found, but the peoples or tribes who did at one time speak the no longer existing Indo-European language—has at times aroused great interest and vivid discussion amongst scholars. While at one time the consensus omnium seemed to vote for an Asiatic origin of the Indo-Europeans, and even, owing to a misunderstanding of the linguistic affinities of Sanskrit, looked for their old home within the borders of India, general opinion seems, since the time of Latham, to have decided for Europe as the cradle of Indo-European-speaking peoples. But as to where in Europe the starting-point of the migrations of these tribes should be looked for no uniform opinion is so far on record. The idea, certainly impossible, that the “Urheimat” should be looked for in Germany and then probably on the southern shores of the Baltic, has long been in favour with German scholars who saw in the ideal old Teutons described by Tacitus a real counterpart of the “Indo-Germanic” ancestors; and Scandinavian archaeologists and philologists have been strongly inclined to adopt this rather fanciful theory and to look for the “Urheimat” not only in Germany but also on the Danish islands and in the southernmost province of Sweden. Other scholars looked for a centre of spread in Hungary, and this theory has quite lately been advocated in an able way by Dr. Giles. The late lamented Professor Schrader, in his sound and thoroughly critical way, tried to establish that South Russia, the rich corn-land to the north of the Black Sea, was the original home of the Indo-Europeans; but he was not quite averse to the idea that they might at one time have extended over areas to the east of that part of Europe. There are other theories as well, but they do not need to be taken into consideration here.