In the Journal of this Society for July, 1897 (pp. 628–641), an interesting communication was made by Mr. J. F. Hewitt regarding the existence of a real community of ownership in land, among the earliest Kolarian and Dravidian village settlers. I had hoped to see this followed up by some further local and other details, as the matter is one of great importance, and one that cannot be elucidated except by the aid of such special local knowledge as Mr. Hewitt, from his long residence on the Central Provinces and in Chutiya Nāgpur, undoubtedly possesses.

This is not an entirely new subject. Mr. Beames, of H.M. Indian Civil Service, in 1875, published a small yet valuable work, called “Comparative Grammar of Modern Aryan Languages of India.” I myself, in 1878, published in greater detail, accompanied by Language Maps, a “Sketch of all the Languages of Nearer and Further India,” and I still hope, that my valued friend Mr. Grierson, of H.M. Indian Civil Service, will, in 1903, after the expiration of a quarter of a century, complete and publish an enlarged and corrected edition of my Sketch; and I have arranged, that the accumulated additional information, entered in my interleaved copy, should after my death be made over to Mr. Grierson, to add to his own collections, for he is out and out the best informed scholar in this branch of Linguistic knowledge at the present epoch.

In my “Notes on Marco Polo's Itinerary in Southern Persia” (Journal R.A.S. 1881, p. 495) 1 expressed the opinion that the city of Camadi, where Marco Polo rested on his march from Kermān to Hormuz, was a caravanserai or village close to the city of Jīruft, and that the name might be explained as “Kahn i Muhammadī,” or “Kanemadi,” as it is pronounced in Jīruft, meaning Canal of Muhammad. Lately, while collecting some historical notes on Kermān, I found that the first part of my supposition was correct, but that my explanation of the name was wrong.

It is only to be expected, while the ancient literature of Buddhist philosophy is inaccessible to the general critic, and still to some extent also to the Indianist, that many hasty generalizations and one-sided conclusions concerning the nature of Buddhist ideals and discipline should continue to prevail. Enough, however, has already been accomplished in the editing of texts to render some revision of what may be called common errors not altogether premature. There is, for instance, much that is misleading, or downright false, in labelling Gotama's doctrine as Pessimism, Pantheism, Atheism, Nihilism, Quietism, or Apatheia. Nor is that recent criticism altogether discriminating which finds in it the closest coincidences with that of Schopenhauer, or characterizes it bluntly as an ethic rooted in egoism, or as “the crassest eudaemonism,” and aspiring to moral stultification.

In my Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library (pp. 69–86) I described, at what may have seemed rather inordinate length, a work called the Jāvidān-i-Kabīr, which aroused my interest in the highest degree. The interest of this work, as I there pointed out, is twofold: it embodies very remarkable doctrines, apparently akin to those of the Isma'īlīs or Shī'ites of the “Sect of the Seven”; and considerable portions of it are written in a peculiar dialect of Persian which certainly merits a fuller study. Concerning the author of this work, Faẓlu'llāh b. Abī Muḥammad of Tabrīz, called “al-Ḥurūfī,” we know little (except what may be gleaned from his writings) beyond what is contained in the brief notice of Ibn Ḥajar al-'Asqalānī (d. a.h. 852), cited by Flügel at pp. vii–viii of the preface to the second volume of his edition of Hājī Khalfa. “Faẓlu'llāh,” says Ibn Ḥajar, “the son of Abū Muḥammad of Tabrīz, was one of those innovators who subject themselves to ascetic discipline. Imbued with heretical doctrine, he finally produced the sect known as the Ḥurūfīs [from ‘Letters’] pretending that the Letters [of the alphabet] were metamorphoses of men, together with many other idle and baseless fancies. He invited the Amīr Tīmūr the Lame [Tamerlane] to adopt his heresies, but he desired to slay him. And this came to the knowledge of his son (with whom he had sought refuge), and he struck off his head with his own hand.

In the Eastern corner of North Africa is a country very little explored, the extreme Eastern Headland of which is called Cape Guardafui, known to the ancients as Aromáta Promontorum. The Region has a frontage to the Red Sea, and to the Indian Ocean, and its geographical position is in its favour. There is no Protestant Missionary Station within its boundaries: there is no portion of the Scriptures translated into the Language of the people.