In a letter which I had the honor of writing to Mr. Dundas Secretary of State in November [9–11th] last, I communicated to him my intention of convoying in the Lion, if necessary, your Ships of this Season to England and in my letter of last month, I gave him my reasons why I suffered the five Ships which I found laden on my arrival at Canton to sail from thence without waiting for the remainder, which tho more in number, were represented as more in need of protection. I am confirmed in my resolution of accompanying the latter, by the accounts received within these few days, of the Enemy having been in force in the straits of Sunda, where one of your Ships the Princess Royal has been captured. As this event must give you some alarm with regard to the safety of your homeward bound Ships now lying here, it will be some satisfaction to you to know that nothing shall prevent me from accompanying them in His Majesty's ship the Lion, whose force will, I trust, be sufficient for their protection.

Casual references in the chronicles of the time show that the Turkish kings of Delhi recognized, and on occasion utilized, the local functionaries—the headmen and registrar accountants of villages and parganas—who formed an integral part of the Hindu administrative system. No references to these functionaries have been traced under the Afghan kings, but they reappear in the Mogul period, the literature of which enables us to form some idea of the position and duties, as then understood, of three out of the four. The village headman, renamed muqaddam, represented the village in its dealings with the officials, and he was required in particular to be active in agricultural development by bringing the waste land of the village under the plough. The village registrar-accountant, who retained his Hindī name of paṭwārī, kept the records and accounts of the village, and was required to assist the officials in the assessment and collection of the revenue. In the same way the registrar-accountant of the pargana, renamed qānūngo, kept the records of the pargana; and when assessment was made on the village as a unit, his estimate of its capacity to pay was one of the indispensable data. The remaining functionary, the chaudhrī or headman of the pargana, scarcely appears in the chronicles of the period, while the administrative literature contains practically nothing to show what he was expected to do, or how he was remunerated; indeed the only reference to him which has been traced in the Āīn-i Akbarī is the statement (Jarrett, ii, 228) that in the province of Berār the chaudhrī was known as desmukh. This statement shows that the chaudhrī was a familiar figure in the north, but it shows nothing more.

In a well-known collection of ritual notes, the Ta Tai Li (The Rites of the Elder Tai), considered to be earlier than the Han period (206 B.C.), there is a calendar section (No. 47), termed Hsia Hsiao Chêng (The Lesser Canon of the Hsia), which is traditionally regarded as a true relic of the Hsia dynasty (about 2000 B.C.). It was translated by DouglasR. K.Professor (Orientalia Antiqua, 1882) and was regarded by him and some other students as of great antiquity. On the other hand, it is very difficult to understand, in the light of modern discoveries as to the Shang culture (circa 1200 B.C.), how such a document could have been produced in 2000 B.C., and the more conservative students are unwilling to admit that it can be much older than, say, 500 B.C.

The image of the Buddha which is the most widely renowned and the most revered by Buddhists throughout Tibet and Central Asia is the image in the Jo-wo-Khang, the Great Temple at Lhasa. This image has been mentioned by many writers. Sarat Chandra Das says, “The image is exquisitely modelled and represents a handsome young prince. The Kunyer said that the image represented the Buddha when at the age of twelve, hence the princely apparel in which he is clothed and the dissimilarity of the image to those seen elsewhere.” The Japanese monk Ekai Kawaguchi also refers to the image, but does not describe it. But, until Sir Francis Younghusband's Mission reached Lhasa in 1904, it had not been described in detail by anyone who had seen it. It was then seen by certain of the officers on the Expedition, and has been described by Colonel L. A. Waddell, who was with the Mission as Principal Medical Officer, in his Book Lhasa and its Mysteries (1905), and by the late Mr. Perceval Landon, who was with the Mission as the Correspondent of The Times, in his book Lhasa (1905). These two descriptions differ as regards every detail and cannot be reconciled.

The duty of the pilgrimage to the sanctuary of the Ka'ba (ḥajj), as imposed by Qur'ān 3: 91 on every Muslim, has been expounded in all the collections of traditions (ḥadīth) and all the textbooks of canonical law (fiqh). Historians dealt with the institution of the pilgrimage, and geographers described the sacred cities of Makka and Madīna as well as the surrounding country of al-Ḥijāz. The traditional and topical information about the pilgrimage had in time increased so much that in the sixth century A.H./twelfth century A.D. the celebrated Baghdād polyhistor Ibn al-Jauzī could compile it in a medium-sized handbook.

Over forty years ago a number of bricks, inscribed with Buddhist sūtras, were discovered in an underground chamber at Gopālpur in the Gorakhpur district of the United Provinces by men ransacking the site for building materials. Four of these came into the possession of Dr. Hoey and Mr. Vincent Smith, who published an account of the find with a transcription of one of the bricks in Proc. ASB., 1896, July, pp. 99–103, but there is reason to believe that a number more remained in the hands of the villagers or were built into an indigo vat by the local zamindar. No further steps were taken for publication of the texts, though references to them have been made occasionally since; and the bricks themselves were lost sight of. On taking over recently at the Indian Institute in Oxford, I noticed in one of the cases of the small Museum attached to it several inscribed bricks, which on examination were found to be the missing ones, Mrs. Hoernle having presented them some fifteen years ago. They were still largely encrusted with mortar, which made the reading of many characters difficult, but Mr. Rickard of the Ashmolean Museum proved equal to removing these deposits and to rendering them as legible as on the day they were inscribed, except for certain fractures. As the contents are of considerable interest to Buddhist scholars, I publish a transcription of the unpublished portion here, and for the benefit of those interested in palæography I adjoin photographs of IIa, IIIb, and IVa; it is not necessary to reproduce them in their entirety, as the writing on all the bricks is of the same kind and the repetitions in the matter are such that the portions not illustrated contain hardly any characters of which typical specimens are not available on the plates.

In the new edition of Clavijo, Embassy to Tamerlane, translated from the Spanish by Guy Le Strange (publ. Harper and Brothers, New York and London, 1928), I noticed several errors and offer the following in correction thereof.

In search of fresh material for the history of the Saljūqs of ‘Irāq I had the good fortune, during my stay in Istanbul from the middle of September, 1937, till the end of January, 1938, to find and study many MSS., both in Arabic and Persian. I propose to give here a bare inventory of some of these MSS. to bring them to the notice of interested Orientalists, with little or no attempt at scholarly presentation, as my entire time, at present, is occupied with the subject mentioned above. But I hope to contribute a detailed study of the same at a later date.