The six lithographs which follow contain fac-similes of a grant made to the Syrian Church in India by one of the early native princes. The original is engraved on both sides of six copper plates. An account of the loss of these plates, or of their abstraction by the Portuguese at the close of the sixteenth century, and of their rediscovery in 1806, is given in a memoir printed in the first volume of the Society's Journal, page 177. The fac-similes were procured for the Society through the kindness of F. C. Brown, Esq., from the Rev. B. Bailey, Principal of the College of Cottayam, where the originals are preserved.

Iron ore is found chiefly in the north-west quarter of the Peninsula. The result of my inquiries gives the number of six foundries working at one time, during the fair season, throughout the province, and two or three more occasionally. The extent to which the metal is manufactured will be given in the body of this Report. I have visited only two foundries, those at Ranawao and Ranpoor in the Ranas and Jam's Talookas respectively; but I understand a description of one applies alike to all, their construction being rude and simple.

The history of the Persian poets is the history of the Persian nation; it is the biography of their greatest men, whose lives, whose actions, whose feelings, and whose tastes, are all, in a greater or less degree, associated with poetry and influenced by poetic impulse. This influence was exercised over the highest potentates by the most subordinate of their subjects. Their graver historians supply countless anecdotes of men exalted to rank and power, and enjoying the unlimited favour of their Sovereign by this sole merit. Lives have been sacrificed, or spared—cities have been annihilated, or ransomed—empires subverted, or restored—by the influence of poetry alone. Armies, levied to avenge the insult of an epigram, have been disbanded at its palinodia; the prison has opened its gates to the ingenious author of an impromptu; stanzas have saved a suppliant's life, and a well-turned compliment in verse more than once soothed a breast in which dwelt all the undisciplined passions of Eastern despotism. Even history itself is indebted to this taste, and if not written in verse, its pages are enriched with metrical fragments and quotations, while the earliest annals of the Persian empire are preserved in the poetic legends of the Shah Nameh.

The religion of the Hindus of the Dekkan seems to me to consist of four constituent parts; 1st. Pure Brahmanism, as contained in the Vedas and Puranas; 2nd. An ante-Brahmanical worship, consisting in the adoration of painted stones, which are not acknowledged as objects of worship by the Brahmans, but considered as the representatives of demons; 3d. Buddhism, or that modification of it which subsists among the Jains; and under which heads falls the worship of the Pandharpur Vitthoba. 4. A local superstition based on Brahmanism, and consisting of the worship of remarkable persons who have arisen in the Maratha country in times comparatively modern. It is to these modern local deities that I now solicit attention.

Among the Hindus of Southern India three modes of quarrying granite prevail. The first, and most common, is by the agency of fire. In this process the surface of the bare convex plateaus, or bosses, of the rock is covered with dry fuel, composed generally of bushes of the thorny Acacias common to the surrounding plains,—viz., those of the Babul and Kikar,—and proportioned in quantity according to the thickness of the slabs required. The fuel is set fire to, and suffered to burn, except in a few cases, until entirely consumed; when the subjacent rock will be found to have exfoliated in a cavo-convex flake, thinning off towards the edges, and varying in extreme thickness from six to twenty-four inches. The longer continued and more intense the heat, the deeper, in general, the line of separation. The flake is detached by driving small iron wedges underneath, and raising it with an iron lever: the separation is assisted, when the rock is refractory, by dropping a heavy boulder of greenstone or granite on its surface; or, when heated, by a sudden affusion of cold water.

About the middle of 1836 I sent to the late Mr. J. Prinsep, then Secretary to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a brief account of a hill of ashes, situate at Budigunta, about eleven miles W. from Bellary, in the Ceded Districts, which he published in the Journal of the Society for October of the same year under the head of “Note on the occurrence of Volcanic Scoria in the Southern Peninsula;”—a title given by himself to the communication, from which it may be inferred that he was inclined to consider the ashes (specimens of which were forwarded) as of volcanic origin.

The subject of the Sanskrit poem called the Mahábhárata is well known to be the struggle for supremacy between two kindred and rival families, those of Pándu and Kuru. The event is in all probability historically true, and the circumstances related in the poem, however blended with fiction and coloured by mythology, are in many instances likely to be substantially authentic. It is, however, Jn the episodical portions with which the poem abounds, that information of a curious and no doubt, in the main, correct description, relating to the social and political state of India, at periods considerably anterior to the Christian æra, is to be found. The information, it is true, is of a mixed character, as might be expected in a professedly poetical composition, and in a work which has very possibly been from time to time corrupted by comparatively modern interpolation. Still there is much that wears the semblance of accuracy and antiquity, as in the instances which I propose to bring to the observation of the Society.

This substance, which although it differs in some particulars from the Kino which is found in the shops, yet as it agrees in its most important properties with what has so long been described under that name, it is most convenient to call it Butea Kino.

These are some excavations, said to have been made under the direction of Hyder, on the lower ridge of the copper mountain range in the Ceded Districts, five or six miles westerly from the cantonment of Bellary, in about lat. 15° 5′ N., and long. 76° 59′ E.; they were given up, according to native information, in consequence of the little profit yielded. The ore,—the green carbonate of copper,—I found in thin layers, filling up seams, and interlaminated with a slate-clay and slate, resembling the killas of Cornwall, which is associated with hornblende and chloritic schists, alternating with gneiss in conformable strata. The former contain thin veins of crystalline marble, and, with the gneiss, have been penetrated by large basaltic dykes. Bosses of granite are seen in the plain at the base. The highest peaks of the range are capped with a ferruginous cellular rock resembling laterite, and resting horizontally on the highly-inclined strata of the crystalline schists; it exhibits efflorescences of impure muriate of soda and sulphate of aluminaj the latter resulting, probably, from the decomposition of iron pyrites which are occasionally found in this rock. Depositions of kunker are seen at considerable elevations, on the sides of the range, and often covering, in beds of variable thickness, the rocks in the plain. The excavations made in search of the ore are not of great magnitude, and must have been speedily given up. I was unable to detect any distinct lode. I have observed indications of a similar ore in the plumbiferous district of Jungumrazpilly, in the Cud-dapah Collectorate, Ceded Districts.

Although it is the object of this paper to notice all the known magnesite localities of Southern India, its scope is more particularly directed to that of the Salem province, as being the most extensive, and as yielding the mineral in the greatest abundance.

The chromate of iron mines of South India are situate near Curpúr, about four miles to the N.W. of Salem, a town which stands in lat. 11° 37′ N., and long. 78° 13′ E., among some hilly, jungly tracts at the S.W base of the Shevaroy Hills.

[Note. Several years ago, at the close of the military operations of the Madras Government in Goomsur, Captain (then Lieutenant) Macpherson executed by order of government a survey of the country, and in that service lost his health. From the Cape of Good Hope, whither he had gone for its recovery, he transmitted his notes on the religion of the Khonds to a relative in this country, who considered them to possess so much novelty and general interest, that he presented them to the Society, upon his own responsibility, and without the sanction of the writer: and a few additions having been since made, the paper is now laid before the public.]

The accompanying drawing represents the Arms granted by the Governor-General of India, Lord William H. C. Bentinck, to Maharaja Kali Krishna Bahadur, a native of rank and distinction at Calcutta, in testimony of the high sense entertained by his lordship and the British Government in India of the zeal and exertions of the Raja in furthering the cause of education, and of his own talents and labours in the pursuit and extension of knowledge.