Abū ‘Alī Muḥammad b. ‘Ali b. al-Ḥasan b. Muqlah, better known as Ibn Muqlah, was born in Baghdad in A.H. 272 (I. Kh.). It has been said that “the details of the childhood of great men are apt to be petty and cloying”; the historians have not provided an opportunity of judging of the truth of this generalization in his case, for their notices only begin when he had already set about earning a livelihood. He worked in one of the dīwāns or administrative departments on a salary of six dīnārs per mensem (Fakh., 318). Fortune favoured him, and while yet very young he came to enjoy intimacy with and a share in the counsels of Ibnu'l-Furāt during the first term of his wazirate, which extended from 296, the year following the accession of the Khalīfah al-Muqtadir, to 299. He had a turn for composition both in prose and verse, and well illustrated the Arab adage: “the pen is one of the two tongues” (al-‘Iqdu'l-Farīd, ii, 153, Cairo, 1316). Specimens of his verses will be given later; Ibn Miskawayh quotes his prose-account of the circumstances in which news of the murder in 296 of Md. b. Dāaūd b. al-Jarrāḥ, after he had been enticed from the place where he had concealed himself when his intrigue on behalf of Ibnu'l-Mu‘tazz miscarried, was secretly communicated to Ibnu'l-Furāt; he there states that on this occasion he was a companion of the wazir's privacy (TU., 66).

[In view of the curiosity which has been aroused by the examination of the works of Father Thomas Stephens, S.J., preserved in the Marsden Collection—which has now been transferred from King's College to the School of Oriental Studies—the following biography of this first Englishman to visit India cannot fail to be of interest to our readers. The letter addressed by Thomas Stephens to his father, in which he recounts the incidents of his voyage to India, does not appear in print for the first time, but on account of its innate charm of style, and of the vivid picture it presents of a voyage round the Cape in the second half of the sixteenth century, it certainly deserves to be better known, and no excuse is required for its reproduction. —Editor.]

The Basin of the Rivers Oxus and Jaxartes (which may be regarded as a single unit from the geographical as well as the historical point of view) has several times over played a particular part in the world's history. In conjunction with its complement, the Basin of the Tarim, it has served as a corridor or line of communication between the home-lands of several independent civilizations. By this route; the Middle Eastern World (and the Mediterranean World behind it) has communicated with India, and both India and the Middle East (sometimes alternately and, less often, simultaneously) with the Far Eastern World of China, Korea, and Japan.

As cousin marriage has been dealt with so exhaustively by Sir James Frazer and also by Professor Westermarck, I feel I owe some apology for bringing forward the subject again. In the first place I must say that I put together the notes for this paper before the publication of either Folk-lore in the Old Testament or the new edition of The History of Human Marriage, and that I am concerned not with the problem as to how this form of marriage has arisen, but why it has spread as it has, and indeed is still spreading.

Errata in “Studies in Semitic Kinship”, I, Bulletin, Vol. III, Part I, pp. 51–68

p. 56, col. 3, 1. 9, for dsōdoh read dōdah.

p. 56, col. 5, 1. 9, for 'amont read 'ant.

pp. 59 and 60, for Buchanan Grey read Buchanan Gray.

The farce styled Matta-vilāsa-prahasana, to which I have previously adverted in these columns (I, iii, p. 35 ff.), seems to have formerly enjoyed a considerable vogue in Southern India, owing perhaps as much to its genuine merits as to its royal authorship. The scene in it where the Buddhist friar recites the Sikkhāpadas is echoed in another play, the Bhagavad-ajjukīya; a reference to it has been pointed out in my paper on the Kalyāna-sāugandhika (above, III, i, p. 35); and there exists an anonymous commentary upon it (Brit. Mus. Or. 9272).

Mr. k. rama pisharoti, m.a., has very kindly reported to me the readings of the MSS. of the Kalyāṇasāugandhikam in the library of the Sanskrit College at Trippoonithura, and I gratefully present the most important of them as a supplement to my provisional edition of that play in this Bulletin, Vol. IV, p. 33 ff.

This is an attempt, made so far as I know for the first time, to give a Hindi translation of all the more ordinary phonetic terms in use at present. Doubtless the list could have been enlarged by the inclusion of rarer words, but such a course might have lessened its utility. The phonetic words or phrases have been taken for the most part from a work by Professor Jones. They number about 180. A few of the Hindi equivalents will be recognized as common in works on grammar. They do not, however, carry one far. For the rest I have had to put down the words which seemed to me best to express the required idea. Pioneer work of this description is always capable of improvement. It should be undertaken not by an individual but by a learned committee.

The fate of Bhāsa has been an unhappy one; long but little more than a name, his dramas have now been rescued from oblivion only to become the object of an energetic attack, which assures us that they are compilations and adaptations made for the stage of Kerala not earlier than the eighth century A.D., derived to some unknown extent from the works of Bhāsa. which, however, are now lost.

Of the Primitive Indian stops it is true to say, as Dr. J. Bloch says of their descendants in Marāthī, that in most of the modern Indo-Aryan languages they have in principle remained unchanged. This is certainly true of initial stops; and although single intervocalic stops have with the exception of the cerebrals disappeared, new intervocalic stops, double or single, have been introduced as the result of assimilation among consonant groups.

Hindu cosmography—a vast science of rather complicated nature—has quite recently been made accessible to European scholars by the meritorious efforts of Professor Kirfel, who, in his excellent work Die Kosmographie der Inder nach den Quellen dargestellt (Bonn and Leipzig, 1920), has first of all given us a systematical treatise on this subject, based upon all available sources belonging to Brahmin, Buddhist, and Jain lore. At the beginning of each of the three chief sections of his work Professor Kirfel has mentioned his European predecessors; from these summaries we gather that, while Buddhist cosmography has often been dealt with, though never hitherto in a thoroughly systematic way, and Jain cosmography has scarcely ever been made the subject of profound research, no author except Wilford and Pullé has ever tried to deal exhaustively with the entire domain of Brahmin conceptions of the universe. It seems, indeed, remarkable that this large and interesting subject, which is, besides, of great importance for the study of Hindu religion, literature, etc., should have attracted the attention of so very few scholars; and although the present writer does not, in the main, venture or wish to dissent from the highest living authority on the subject, he would like to draw attention, in brief, to some earlier notices on Hindu cosmography occurring in European literature of centuries preceding the date when the literature of India began to be a subject of truly scientific research in the Western world.