It is deeply interesting to know how men's minds worked when the world was young. And it is to Babylonia—the cradle of the human race—that we must go for some evidence of this. The low alluvial plains at the head of the Persian Gulf are covered with the remains of primitive cities, palaces, temples, and cemeteries; from one of which, fifty years ago, was disinterred the little slab of unbaked clay which is now to engage, our attention, as embodying the world's earliest known arithmetical system.

This coin belongs to Professor Gardner's class (γ), “Base silver; type, Śiva” (Brit. Mus. Oat., Greek and Scythic Kings, etc., p. 104), and to the latter of the two subdivisions into which the coins of this class naturally fall. The broad characteristics of these subdivisions are as follows:—(1) King on horseback 1.; name title trātārassa; rounded forms correct Greek: (2) king on horseback r.; name title maha(ṃ)tassa; square forms corrupted Greek. A further distinction is that, in the former, the name and all the titles of the Kharoṣṭhī inscription are in the genitive case; in the latter, the name only is in the genitive, and the titles are given in their undeclined base-form, as if they were the first part of a compound which the name was intended to complete. In the case of both, and wherever else it occurs on the coins of Gondophares, there can be no doubt that the correct title is devavrata, ‘devoted to the gods,’ and not devatrāta or devahada as hitherto read; that is to say, the third akṣara, on good specimens, seems to be undoubtedly intended for rather than for or .

At the hāvan ratu (the hāvan prayer-time) [the hāvan gāh] Haoma came to Zartūšt (Zaraθuštra) (2) when he was cleaning around the fire, when he wished to wash the fireplace and when he was intoning the Gāθas [when he uttered the ašem vōhu which is thrice said, and which is before the fravarānih (? i.e. the fravarānẹ)].

It is a matter for some surprise, that, of the scholars who have been engaged in public in the attempt to settle the date of Kanishka, none should have noticed the existence of a member of his dynasty who ought to have been recognised at least eight years ago. The case is as follows.

Some twelve miles east of the junction of the Sawān with the Indus, between Makhad and Kālābāgh, and about three miles due south of the village of Shāh Muhammad Wālī in the north-west corner of the Jhelum (Jehlam) district, is an old temple called Kālar or Sassī dā Kallara, which has hitherto escaped notice. It is situated at a height of about 1,100 feet above sea-level, on the edge of a hillock rising steeply from the bank of the Kas Letī, one of the torrents, tributary to the Sawān stream, which descend from the northern face of the Salt Range; it here passes through a rough tract of hillocks and ravines. The temple is in a ruinous condition, due largely to the gradual wearing away of the soft sandstone hillside on the edge of which it stands, and its further decay will probably be rapid.

My esteemed friend Mr. Henry G. Scott, Director of the local Royal Department of Mines and Geology, who had just returned from a tour of inspection of the mining districts in the Malay Peninsula, sent to me for examination two small gold coins which he had obtained in the course of his tour. They were found, together with a considerable number of similar coins, by some people who had occasion to dig a hole in the grounds of a Siamese Wat (Buddhist monastery) in the province of Jaring, near Patani. This was more than a year ago. Jaring is a Malay state, but has a large Siamese population which is comparatively modern.

I present here a short tract from Mdo, vol. cxxxiii, foil. 330–2, entitled Īśvarakartṛtranirākṛtir Viṣṇorekakartṛtvanirākaraṋam, or “Refutation of the idea of God as Creator (sic): Refutation of the idea of Viṣṇu as sole Creator (sic).” It is ascribed to Nāgārjuna, who is named as the author of about one hundred works noted by me in the Tanjur. The fact that it appears in one of the last volumes of the Mdo, and that both the Sanskrit and the native versions are given, seem to indicate that the work was a comparatively late accession to the Tibetan collection. I give both versions in order to fix the text. The work is, as will be seen, of a simple type, adapted, as it states, to the learner (suśiṣyapratibodhārtham), and in character quite different from the famous nyāya treatise of Udayana, the Kusumāñjali, which seeks to establish the contrary.