THE Bashgalīs are the inhabitants of the valleys of the Bashgal River and its contributories. Their settlements extend so far as Bīrkot on the Chitral stream. According to Dr. Grierson, their dialect can be taken as the type of the language of the Siāh-pōsh Kāfirs of Northern Kāfiristan. An excellent book on Bashgalī has been published by Colonel J. Davidson, C.B., I.S.C., and the remarks which follow are exclusively based on it. I have also, throughout, adopted Colonel Davidson's writing of Bashgalī words, with the sole exceptions that I have substituted χ for his kh (sometimes written kh), ϒ for his gh (sometimes written gh), ṅ for his ng, and cancelled the underlining of sh and zh.

PROFESSOR Nikolsky has been kind enough to send me a photographand copy of a new and important Vannic inscription which he has published, with translation and commentary, in the Reports of the Imperial (Russian) Archaeological Commission, 37. The inscription was found at Armavir. Its importance for the study of Vannic philology, as well as the fact that I believe I can improve upon Professor Nikolsky's translation, induces me to reproduce it here. In continuance of my previous notation its number will be XCI.

IT is with regret that I now find it impracticable to accept as authentic a passage in the Haydarābād MS. which had been welcomed there, (1) because being with that good text, it accredited the same passage in Ilminsky's imprint and in the Mémoires de Baber, and (2) because, however ineffectually, it provides something to fill the Bābar-nāma gap of 908 a.h.

LE numéro d'Octobre 1910 du JRAS. a publié des critiques de M. Farjenel sur la traduction d'une inscription du Yun-nan que j'ai fait paraître dans le Journal Asiatique de Juillet-Août 1909. La place dont je puis disposer ici ne me permet pas de discuter phrase par phrase et mot par mot le texte dans son intégralité; je m'efforcerai cependant de ne laisser dans l'ombre aucun point essentiel; je donnerai d'ailleurs à la fin de l'article une traduction complète de la stèle, ce qui permettra au lecteur de juger des modifications que j'ai apportées à ma première traduction; ces modifications résultent, non des critiques de M. Farjenel, qui me paraissent mal fondées, mais des recherches nouvelles que j'ai faites pour élucider quelques unes des obscurités de ce texte.

SEVERAL systems of expressing numbers, used in India, have been explained by Professor Bühler in §§ 33 to 35 of his work on Indian palaeography. There is a system, a highly interesting one, which was not noticed by him, because it has not been found used in inscriptions or in the pagination of literary works; namely, that of the astronomer Āryabhaṭa. It has been mentioned briefly by various other writers. And it was considered in some detail by Mr. C. M. Whish in 1820, and at more length by M. Léon Rodet in 1880. Those two treatments of it, however, scarcely suffice to do justice to it; particularly from lacking any table to make its details clear. And it deserves a full exposition, because it is of special interest in connection with two topics which have been reopened lately by Mr. G. R. Kaye; namely, the early use of the abacus in India, and the development of the decimal notation, that is, of the system of the nine significant digits 1 to 9, with the zero, cipher, or naught, used with place-value so that any particular sign denotes units, tens, thousands, etc., or the absence of them, according to its position as written in a row of figures. I propose, therefore, to consider it exhaustively here, but without venturing at present to offer any opinion on the two topics which Mr. Kaye has reopened: I only seek to exhibit fully, with a few introductory remarks about Āryabhaṭa himself, a system of numeration which must certainly be regarded as an important factor in considering them.

THE excavations at Bhīṭā, near Allahabad, which I am about to describe, signalize a new departure in Indian Archaeology; for they mark the first occasion on which a serious effort has been made to explore the remains of an ancient Indian town, and the results attained from hem consequently deserve a somewhat more detailed description than would otherwise be given here. The site at Bhīṭā is far from being an extensive one, and the old town, of which even the name is uncertain, could never have been of any great importance, except perhaps from a military standpoint; yet in spite of this, and in spite, too, of the fact that the digging was confined to a very small part of it, the discoveries that have been made are full of archaeological interest, and serve to indicate very clearly what a rich harvest of finds may be expected when the sites of the great cities like Taxila, Pataliputra, and Vidiśā come to be systematically and thoroughly investigated, as I sincerely hope they will be in the course of the next decade. I myself had hoped to start on the exploration of the last-named city during the past winter, but owing to unforeseen difficulties raised by the Gwalior Darbar the project had to be abandoned, and at the last moment I was reluctantly compelled to fall back on the much inferior site at Bhīṭā, where it was manifest from the outset that, whatever other discoveries might be brought to light, little or nothing of a highly artistic order or of great historical value need be looked for.

IT is only with the greatest diffidence that I offer the following notes on the document, in a hitherto unknown script, of which a facsimile is appended in the accompanying plate. My remarks may appear premature, and in any case the results obtained are very slight, but it was thought advisable to publish them as a preliminary notice, in the hope that some more competent scholar might be able to help in the decipherment.

The short and much damaged edict of Aśōka at Sāņchi is not without interest, because it supplements and explains the still more fragmentary Allahabad edict and the mutilated fourth line of the Sarnath edict. The beginning of the Sanchi edict is lost, and the legible words of the first and second of the preserved lines do not yield a complete sentence. The end of the second line and the beginning of the third have not yet been deciphered completely.