Some ten years ago a Brahman scholar was travelling by rail from Jaunpur to Allahabad. At a country station there was an incident familiar in those parts: a number of women crowded the platform, weeping and bidding farewell to their men-folk, who were going to Calcutta to find work. Two or three of the women got into the carriage with their husbands, and, as the journey continued, began a, song. One line of this made a great impression on the Pandit. “The railway, my rival, has carried away my beloved.” A bold metaphor. In the poetry to which he was accustomed, the rival wife with her interference would be compared to the swan with its mythical power of dividing milk from water. But, after all, was not the railway simile much more natural and vigorous ? The swan simile was part of the stock in trade of centuries of poets, and required a special education and tradition for its understanding. The railway simile spoke from the heart to the heart.

A Lucky find in 1933 enables us to supply the missing beginning and end of the long Ras Shamra tablet printed in JRAS., October, 1932.

In the April issue, 1934, of this Journal, I edited and translated the first chapter of this work of the great Nāgārjuna, still a fundamental treatise in the monasteries of Tibet. I now publish the remaining portions of the second and fourth chapters, the second being incomplete and the third entirely missing. The fifth and last pariccheda contains chiefly vinaya-rules, and will be published in a subsequent issue, along with the Tibetan text and the English translation of the missing portions.

It is remarkable that four important works on the criticism of Arabic poetry, and at the same time anthologies, should appear in one year and, to avoid any misunderstanding, I shall deal with them in the chronological order of the deaths of their authors.

In 1931 the cuneiform alphabet of Ras Shamra was derived from the Sinaitic alphabet by M. Sprengling and A. T. Olmstead (The Alphabet: Its Rise and Development from the Sinaitic Inscriptions, Chicago); and in March, 1934, by E. Ebeling, apparently without knowledge of the work of Sprengling and Olmstead, from Babylonian cuneiform (Zur Enstehungsgeschichte des Keilschriftalphabets von Ras Schamra, Sitz.-Ber. d. Preuss. Akad. d. Wiss.). In June, 1934, J. G. Février, also independently of Sprengling and Olmstead, showed connections with South Semitic, suggesting that the South Semitic alphabet was for the most part derived from the Ras Shamra cuneiform or from a common source (Rev. des Éitudes sémitiques, pp. xiii–xvi). In the same month T. Gaster accepted the theory of Olmstead (Ancient Egypt, 1934, p. 34), and in July, 1935, defended in some detail the origin of the Ras Shamra alphabet from a derivative of the Sinaitic approximating to the Phœnician (PEF. Quarterly, 135 ff.).