The collection of Persian manuscripts preserved in the Cambridge University Library is, compared with the collections of the British Museum or the Bodleian, sadly insignificant both in extent and value. The total number of volumes which it comprises scarcely exceeds 300, and of these only a small proportion is of any conspicuous worth or interest. Some few, however, there are which deserve to be made known to Orientalists, and amongst these is the manuscript which forms the subject of the present notice.

A lingering illness, ending with a premature death, prevented the late Dr. Bhagvânlâl Indrâjî from completing. his article on one of his most important discoveries, the inscriptions on the Mathurâ Lion Pillar. What he had written, or rather dictated to his assistant—a transcript as well as Sanskrit and English translations, together with some notes—was sent after his death to England, with the sculpture (now in the British Museum), and made over for publication to the Royal Asiatic Society. With the permission of the Society's Council, I have undertaken to edit these materials, and thus for the last time to perform a task which I have performed more than once for my lamented friend's papers during his lifetime. In doing this I have compared Dr. Bhagvânlâl's transcript first with the originals on the stone, and afterwards again with an excellent paper impression, presented to me by Dr. James Burgess in 1889. The collation has made necessary some alterations in the transcript and in the translation, among which the more important ones have been pointed out in the notes. But I may confidently assert that all really essential points have been fully settled and explained by Dr. Bhagvânlâl, whose great acumen and scholarship are as conspicuous in his interpretation of these inscriptions as in his other epigraphic publications. For convenience's sake I have prefixed an introduction, summarizing the chief results deducible from the inscriptions.

[Since the publication in this Journal of Paṇḍit Bhagvānlāl's article on the Western Kshatrapas, a period of no less than four years has elapsed. The delay in issuing this, the final portion of his notes, is due to the fact that a study of these notes convinced me of the impossibility of publishing them in anything like their original form; and my task was postponed, until Dr. Bühler most generously undertook to revise the most important part of the Paṇḍit's work, viz. that which deals with the inscriptions engraved on the Lion Capital. Dr. Bühler's results, which are published in another article in the present number, have enabled me to deal with the rest of the work. While I have been obliged to omit some portions and to correct others, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to give a concise and connected exposition of the Paṇḍit's own views.