The recent establishment of a fund in the University of Oxford for the encouragement of the study of the Georgian family of languages may in the course of time attract the attention of British philologists to the Western Caucasus, and an increasing stream of travellers will doubtless find their way thither seeking knowledge, health, sport, and scenery; it is for such visitors that the following vocabulary has been compiled. More than twenty years ago the late Mr. D. Peacock included Svanetian among the five languages of which he published vocabularies in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, but the material was scanty, and a large number of errors are to befound in it. Most of the books on the subject are in Russian, and the script into which the Svanetian words are transliterated is troublesome and is inconsistently used. What is required is an exact record of the spoken language by means of the phonograph, and it is to be hoped that some British student may undertake the task before long. All that is attempted here is to give a starting-point for serious study. As many forms as possible have been included, and no attempt has been made to distinguish the dialects of Upper and Lower Svanetia. The spelling is phonetic as far as may be. The abbreviation G. shows that there are Georgian words strikingly similar, and generally, though not always, having the same meaning; many of such words are borrowed by the Georgian from other languages.

MĀWARDI'S chapter on the office of Ḳāḍi in the Aḥkām Sulṭāniyya, ed. Enger, dealt with in JRAS., 1910, p. 761, is followed by that on Walāyat-al-Maẓālivi; the substanceof this chapter is as follows.

The case set out in the first part of this article, pp. 479–96 above, will, it is hoped, make it clear that the Kaliyuga era is not of historical origin, dating from the occurrence of any actual event in b.c. 3102, and running in actual use from that time. It is nothing but an artificial reckoning —(almost as much so as is our Julian Period, beginning 1 January, b.c. 4713)—devised by the Hindū astronomers some thirty-five centuries after the initial point which they assigned to it; that is, roughly, at some time about a.d. 350–400. And it is the principal Hindū, astronomical reckoning (the other being the Śaka era begiṅning in a.d. 78); used in particular —(just as we use the Julian Period)— for the ahargaṇa or sum of days from the beginning of the reckoning down to any given time.

In China the corpse of a Buddhist priest is commonly disposed of by one of three methods, viz.: cremation, burial, or preservation by drying.

NO doubt Dr. Grierson is right in translating the first of these words as “Adorable” (JRAS., 1910, p. 159 f.), in so far as that translation expresses to the devout believer the supreme divinity of his adored God. Nor is there any objection to the view taken by Govindācārya Svāmi in his paper on the Artha-Pañcaka (ibid., p. 591), that, to the same believer, Bhagavat is the perfect God possessed of the five (or six) attributes— knowledge, power, etc. In a later paper (ibid., p. 861), Govindācārya Svāmi shows that Blessed, Perfect, Glorious, or God, anything, in short, to render approximately the content of the native word, would be sufficient in a translation, which is at best amakeshift, and, because it is devoid of the connotation of the original, can never really translate it to the heart. Any merely etymological translation would, of course, be as unsatisfying to a worshipper of Bhagavat as “loaf-holder” would be if offered as an equivalent of our “Lord”.

The Synaxaria, as also the Menologia, are not among the oldest of hagiographical texts, and consequently their use in public worship in Oriental churches is relatively modern. In the case of the Coptic—Alexandrine Church with which I am now dealing, at the date when its I Synaxarium was composed, Arabic had for long past; taken the place of Coptic as the living language; indeed, in my view, its compilation was an outcome of that religious and literary movement which, from the thirteenth century onwards, gavefresh life and improved order to the Church of Alexandria. The question of the immediate sources of this work—one not as yet ripe for treatment— cannot be dealt with in this place; it may, however, be pointed out that the Synaxarium, as the product of Arabic speaking people, could be easilyput together from all the hagiographical works in use throughout Eastern Christendom by speakers of that tongue. Hagiographical literature is to a great extent a monastic product, and its Greek branch had for its main centre Palestine, and the convents of St. Sabas and of Sinai—witness the names of Cyril of Skythopolis, of John Moschos, of Sophronios, Patriarch of Jerusalem, etc.

Je suis très reconnaissant au Dr. M. A. Stein de m'avoir confié l'étude de la plupart des documents sanscrits qu'il a découverts au cours de sa seconde expédition en Asie Centrale, au prix de quels labeurs, et grâce à quelle ingéniosité prudente et hardie, il nous a permis, avec autant d'humour que de modestie, de le deviner.

Some time after the descriptions of the coins collected by Mr. G. P. Tate were published in the Journal for 1904 and 1905 Sir Henry McMahon brought home the collections which he had made during the time he was the Boundary Commissioner in Seistan, but unfortunately there has been much delay in giving a description of them.

Dr. Lesný (pp. 179–82 of the Journal for January) appears to raise three objections to my criticism on his first note: (1) that my derivations are doubtful, (2) that he meant by genitive that case which Marāṭhī grammarians call dative or accusative, and (3) that he is correct in maintaining what he had said in his first note about the use of animate and inanimate objects of a transitive verb. And he sums up by informing me that Marāṭhī prose of to-day differs from Marāṭhī poetry of the thirteenth century. Will you allow me to offer my final remarks on the subject?