The Khitai fill a notable place in Asiatic history, and the investigation of their ethnology and early history is full of interest and value. It is also surrounded by considerable difficulties. The Khitai, or Khitans as they are otherwise known, conquered Northern China, and it was from them that mediæval geographers and travellers derived the famous name of Cathay, which has much romance about it. The Russians to this day call the Chinese Kitai. The name was perhaps introduced into Europe by the Arabs, whose adventurous merchants began to frequent the ports of China during the supremacy of the Khitai; or it may have travelled westward through the intervention of the Turkish tribes of Central Asia, who called the Khitai Khatai. They never conquered Southern China, nor did their dominion there extend apparently beyond its six northern provinces; but they made up for this by dominating over the various nomade tribes who occupied the country from the river Hurka to Turkestan, and from the Chinese wall to the country of the Tunguses. The Mongols and the tribes of Manchuria were either immediately subject to them, or tributaries; and, in fact, the history of Eastern Asia from the beginning of the tenth to that of the twelfth century was focussed about the Khitai. When their dominion in the further East was broken, as I described in a previous paper, by the Kin or Golden Tartars, a branch of their royal house founded an empire further west, known as Kara Khitai, which has already occupied our attention.

On leaving for India to accompany the army into Afghanistan in 1878, Colonel Yule, among other hints of places of interest of an archæological character to be looked out for, mentioned Nagarahara, the capital of the Jelalabad Valley in the Buddhist period. In the time of Hiouen-Thsang the district bore the same name as the capital, and it had no king of its own, but belonged to Kapisa, a city situated somewhere in the direction of Kabul. The district of Nagarahara extended to about 600 Chinese Li, from east to west, which would be over 100 miles. This might reach from about Jugduluck to the Khyber, so that in this last direction it would thus border on Gandara, and on the other extremity would touch Kapisa, which was also the name of the district as well as the capital of that name. The Valley of Jelalabad is small in comparison to that of the province which formerly belonged to it. From Darunta on the west to Ali-Boghan on the east is fifteen miles, but, on the left bank of the Kabul River, the flat land of Kamah extends the valley on that side, about five or six miles further to the east. The termination of the Valley at this place is called Mirza Kheyl, a white rocky ridge comes down close to the river, and there are remains of Buddhist masonry on it, with caves in the cliff below. On the right bank opposite Mirza Kheyl is Girdi Kas, which lies in a small valley at the northern end of a mass of hills which terminates the Jelalabad Valley on that side at Ali-Boghan, separating it from the Chardeh Plain, which again extends as far as Basawul. I got a kind of bird's-eye view of this one day from a spur of the Sufaid Koh, 8,000 feet high, near to Gundumuck, and the Jelalabad Valley and the Chardeh Plain seemed to be all one, the hills at Girdi Kas appearing at this distance to be only a few slight mounds lying in the middle of this space, which would be altogether about 40 miles in extent. When in the Jelalabad Valley, the Girdi Kas hills are undoubtedly the eastern barrier, while the Siah Koh Range is the western. The Siah Koh Range trends to the south-west, and then turns due west, forming a distinct barrier on the north till it is lost at Jugduluck; there are only some low-lying ridges between Futteeabad and Gundumuck, but they are so small that it might be said to be a continuous valley all the way from Ali-Boghan to the plain of Ishpan. The eastern end of the Siah Koh Range terminates at Darunta, which is the north-west corner of the Jelalabad Valley. The Kabul River, instead of going round the extreme end of this range, has, by some curious freak, found a way through the rocky ridge so close to the extremity, that it leaves only what might be called one vertebra of this stony spine beyond. The river here has formed for itself a narrow gorge through perpendicular cliffs, in which it flows, from the district of Lughman, into the level plain of the Jelalabad Valley. The Surkhab pours down from the Sufaid Koh, starting close to Sikaram, the highest point of the range, which our surveyors found to be 15,600 feet above the sea. It passes over the western end of the Ishpan plain, towards the Siah Koh Range, and it then keeps to the contour of its base all the way to the Jelalabad Valley, and joins the Kabul River about two miles below Darunta.

Several books lately published at Madras show that in the opinion of their authors there is something very wrong in the mode in which suits between so-called Hindûs, involving questions of so-called Hindû law, are now dealt with by the High Court of Judicature at Madras and the courts subordinate thereto. And a perusal of some of the reports of High Courts in other parts of India will lead many to suppose that a not inconsiderable part of the law made by those courts, not by the legislature, for the benefit of so-called Hindûs, is not less open to objection than are many of the doctrines promulgated in Madras. The purpose of this paper is to attempt to show that, whereas the High Court of Judicature at Madras professes, and doubtless desires to keep up, as required by the Civil Courts Act, the laws and customs of the tribes and castes subjected to its jurisdiction, it in fact imposes on them laws of its own making, and which until quite recently have not had force in any part of Jndia. To this end I shall endeavour to prove, as fully as may be possible in the little space at my command, (1) that in ancient times law, in any ordinary acceptation of the term, never was administered to Hindus by Hindûs or others; (2) that if law was administered to Hindûs in ancient times, at all events it never was administered in the kingdoms lying south of the Vindhya mountains; and (3) that if it was, it was not the law contained in the Mitâxarâ, and other books of the kind.

I concluded a former essay on Mohammedan proper names with a promise of renewing the subject in another paper, which should deal with the names of women, and some other points not included in my first sketch. The system, as it is xepresented to us by Arab authors, though somewhat complicated, admits of a distinct arrangement; and each class of proper names throws light on national character and manners, -as they were developed during the first centuries of the Hejra, and have left their traces in countries over which the Arab dominion extended. My former notice touched very slightly on the meaning and etymology of old names, to which my attention was first directed. I was very soon brought to a stand by difficulties inherent in the attempt to trace the origin of ancient names, and which are enhanced in the case of those of the Arabs by the peculiarities in the structure of the language, where the meaning of words varies so much with the strength and position of the vowel-points, of all sounds the most liable to phonetic decay. The language itself has undergone a great change since the time of Mahomet, and many old words and expressions are interpreted on traditional authority.

Since the publication of my paper on Indian Theistic Reformers in the January number of this Journal, I have received the following letter from Mr. Krishna Bihari Sen, brother of Mr. Keshab Chandar Sen