In the Journal for October, 1917 (p. 815), I discussed some of the material available for the study of wages and prices in the latter part of Akbar's reign, and offered the tentative conclusions that, while a much wider basis is desirable for a final judgment, (1) we may take the rupee to have been worth at the Imperial capital about seven times as much grain as in the years 1910–12, (2) on the same basis we may regard urban wages as having been worth sotaewhere about the same amount of grain at the two periods. I have since been enabled to extend the inquiry to certain other commodities, which make, it possible to indicate provisionally and in general terms what money was actually worth to the population of the Imperial capital. The results apply directly only to this population, but they also have some bearing on the economic conditions prevailing over a wider area in Northern India.

It is one pleasing feature of the absence of logical method in these palæographic excursions and alarums, that interesting irrelevancies are more easily introduced and less severely regarded than where a stricter scheme has been pursued.

In Greek philosophy the word λόγος, which by derivation and usage meant speech, discourse, spoken word, assumed at an early period in the history of Greek thought the meaning reason, thought, mind. It is so employed, apparently, first by Heraclitus of the Ionian school at Ephesus. There seems to be in the region of purely Greek thought and religion no conception of λόγος or uttered word of the gods which could have suggested its identification with universal reason, first principle and cause of all things as variously employed in Greek philosophy. Rumour was called Ὄσσα Διóς ἄγγελος, “Rumour the messenger of Zeus,” who goes about stirring up strife. And she is the messenger or dame rumour, Ὄσσα δ'ἄρ' ἄγγελος, who hastens swiftly with evil news, the Fama of Roman mythology. We must suppose, if the Ionian philosophers identified Word with cosmic reason and first principle, that they were induced and influenced by some well-known semi-philosophical use of the term “Word of the gods” as the personification of divine agency. It is wholly inconceivable that the Greek language permitted a sudden transformation of one of its most ancient and perfectly understood words without adequate cause. The etymology and ordinary meaning of λóγος afford no remote suggestion of a divine agent, a first principle. The philosophers certainly did not seize upon it arbitrarily for the most important term in the expression of their thought.

Mr. Stanley Lane-Poole, on p. 311 of his most valuable work The Mohammadan Dynasties, has the following note after his list of the kings of Mālwa: “The list of the kings of Kashmīr should follow here; but their chronology is so uncertain that an accurate table can hardly be constructed. See my Catalogue of the Coins of the Muhammadan States of India, xlvii, 68.” It is evident, therefore, that the coins of this dynasty do not furnish us with sufficient materials for the construction of a complete chronological list of the kings of Kashmīr, and Mr. C. J. Rodgers, writing in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (lxv, pt. i, p. 225, 1896), says of them: “They are not of much value, as I have shown elsewhere, for the assistance they render in fixing the chronology.” I have, therefore, the less reason to regret my inability, far removed as I am from museums and libraries, to consult specimens and catalogues of these coins, and I propose, with the slender materials at my disposal, to make an attempt to solve some of the difficulties of this interesting question and to construct a tentative list of the kings of Kashmīr which may at least form the basis of further investigation by those more fortunately situated than I am. My materials consist chiefly of the Ṭabaqāt-i-Akbarī, Colonel Jarrett's excellent translation of the Āīn-i-Akbarī, and Firishtah's history (Bombay text of 1830). The last-named can hardly be regarded as an independent authority, for Firishtah, in his account of this dynasty, is little more than a copyist of Niām-al-dīn Aḥmad, to whose Ṭabaqāt-i-Akbarī he has added little, but I have found his history useful for the reconstruction of various corrupt and defective passages in the text of my copy of the Ṭabaqāt-i-Akbarī, which is not one of the happiest efforts of the Newal Kishore Press of Lucknow.

The Nyāya-sūtra, which is supposed to be the earliest work extant on Nyāya philosophy, treats of four distinct subjects, viz., (1) the art of debate (tarka), (2) the means of valid knowledge (pramāṇa), (3) the doctrine of syllogism (avayava), and (4) the examination of contemporaneous philosophical doctrines (anya-mata-parīkṣā). The first subject, ample references to which are met with in the old Brahmanic, Buddhistic, and Jaina works, seems to have been first handled by a sage named Gotama or Gautama, who is reputed to have flourished in Mithilā (North Behar) about 550 b.c. The second subject, which is also referred to in old books, was associated with the art of debate at a very early stage. These two subjects, combined together, constitute the Tarka - śāstra (the philosophy of reasoning), popularly known as Gautamī vidyā (the Gotamide learning).

Pischel, in §§3, 4, and 5 of his Prakrit Grammar, refers very briefly to the Vibhāṣās of the Prakrit grammarians. In § 3 he quotes Mārkaṇḍēya's (Intr., 4) division of the Prakrits into Bhāṣā, Vibhāṣā, Apabhraṁśa, and Paiśāca, his division of the Vibhāṣās into Śākārī, Cāṇḍālī, Śābarī, Ābhīrikā, and Ṭākkī (not Śākkī, as written by Pischel), and his rejection of Auḍhrī (Pischel, Oḍrī) and Drāviḍī. In § 4 he says, “Rāmatarkavāgīśa observes that the vibhāṣāḥ cannot be called Apabhraṁśa, if they are used in dramatic works and the like.” He repeats the latter statement in § 5, and this is all that he says on the subject. Nowhere does he say what the term vibhāṣā means. The present paper is an attempt to supply this deficiency.