Students of early history are greatly indebted to Mr. Philipps for the clear and compendious form in which, in his article entitled “The Connection of St. Thomas the Apostle with India,” published in the Indian Antiquary, vol. 32, 1903, pp. 1 ff., 145 ff., he has brought together from so many works, some of them not easily accessible, even if they were known, to general readers, so much matter of importance about the Christian tradition which connects St. Thomas the Apostle with India.

Of the flowing river the flood ever changeth, on the still pool the foam gathering, vanishing, stayeth not. Such too is the lot of men and of the dwellings of men in this world of ours. Within City-Royal, paved as it were with precious stones, the mansions and houses of high and low, rivalling in length of beam and height of tiled roof, seem builded to last for ever, yet if you search few indeed are those that can boast of their antiquity. One year a house is burnt down, the next it is rebuilded, a lordly mansion falls into ruin, and a mere cottage replaces it: The fate of the occupants is like that of their abodes. Where they lived folk are still numerous, but out of any twenty or thirty you may have known scarce two or three survive. Death in the morning, birth in the evening. Such is man's life — a fleck of foam on the surface of the pool.

The Mānāvuḷu - sandesaya, or in Pali Mahānāgakula - sandesa, which to-day first reaches the Western reader, is a little Pali poem of somewhat singular character. It is in the form of a poetical epistle, in the style of high kāvya. It is dated from Mahānāgakula (Mānāvuḷu), a city of Ceylon. After long and occasionally complicated panegyrics upon this city, a local Buddhist monastery, and the mahāthera Nāgasena residing in the latter, it proceeds to describe in similar strains the city of Arimaddanapura (Pugāma, the modern Pagan), the emperor Siri-Dhammarāja who bears rule therein, a monastery built by the latter near his capital, and a distinguished mahāthera named Kassapa - Saṅgha - rakkhita who dwells there. Then follows an address from Nāgasena to Kassapa, in which Nāgasena mentions that he has received a letter from Kassapa through a minister Ñāṇa, apparently containing a request. The poem here practically comes to an end. Five verses follow, containing greetings to a certain Sāriputta and an exhortation to reform the Church in Pagan as it had been reformed in Ceylon by Parākrama-bāhu; but as these verses are in part grossly corrupt, as they are singularly feeble and debased in style, and as they are ignored by the Sinhalese translator of the rest of the poem, we are justified in regarding them with suspicion. Either they are altogether spurious, or they are a rough draft which the poet never worked out. The poem is thus a mere fragment.

As a contribution towards solving the question of the origin of the inhabitants of the North - Western Frontier of British India, i.e., of Gilgit, Chitral, and Kāfiristān, I would draw attention to the fact that several legends as to the early customs of these tribes point to cannibalism having once prevailed there. The interpretation of the word Piśāca as meaning ‘an eater of raw flesh,’ ’Ωμοφ⋯γος, is well known. Some of the legends have been printed, and of these I do not propose to give more than a brief sketch, with references to the authorities. Others, hitherto unpublished, I shall give at greater length.

Some seventeen years ago, the Government of Mysore inaugurated a new departure in archæology, the results of which have been greatly appreciated by those who are interested in exploring the ancient history of India. They appointed Mr. B. Lewis Rice, then their Secretary and previously their Director of Public Instruction, to be Director of Archæological Researches. And they made provision for the collection and publication by him, in a series of volumes entitled Epigraphia Carnatica, of the texts, with abstract translations and historical introductions, of all the inscriptional records of their territory.

Every Persian scholar must, I suppose, have meditated at some time or other on the extraordinary disproportion between the vast number of Persian poets whose names are familiar to him, and whose lives are enshrined in the Biographies of ‘Awfí, Dawlatsháh, Taqiyyu'd-Dín Káshí, Luṭf ‘Alí Beg, and other tadhkira-writers, and the small number whose works are read, even in the East, save by the very curious or diligent student. So far as the West is concerned, it may be said, I think, that of only four, Firdawsí, Sa‘dí, ‘Umar Khayyám, and Ḥáfi, does any clear and definite idea exist amongst educated Europeans not specially interested in Oriental literature. Of these four, thanks primarily to Edward FitzGerald, ‘Umar Khayyám is certainly the most popular in the West, especially in Europe and America; though ‘Awfí, writing exactly a century after his death, totally ignores him, and Dawlatsháh only mentions him incidentally in the course of another biography; while even his personal friend and admirer, Niámí-i-‘Arúḍí of Samarqand, places him in his Chahár Maqála not in the section which he devotes to poets, but in that which deals with astronomers. Ḥáfi, accessible to non-Orientalists in England in at least three good metrical translations, those of Hermann Bicknell, Miss Gertrude Bell, and Mr. Walter Leaf, and in Germany in the complete versified translation of Rosenzweig-Schwannau, certainly comes next in point of popularity.