Horace Irvin Poleman, Chief of the Orientalia Division of the Library of Congress, died on November 6,1965, in the Georgetown University Hospital in Washington. He was born in Philadelphia on September 5, 1905, graduated from the College of the University of Pennsylvania in 1927, having been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, received the degree of M.A. in classical languages from the same university in 1930 and the Ph.D. degree in Sanskrit in 1933. His doctoral dissertation (unpublished) was an edition and translation of the Aurdhvadehika-paddhati, a mediaeval Sanskrit text on death ritual. In 1939 he married Jenny Falk, who with their sons, Karl and Robert, survives him.

The most often mentioned impediments to the development of private enterprise in underdeveloped countries are: (i) shortage of capital; (2) deficient economic setting such as poor infrastructure, small market and inadequate credit facilities; and (3) shortage of the right kind of entrepreneurs, sometimes presented within a broader context of the low level of awareness of and responsiveness to economic opportunities.

Monarchy was the dominant political institution of the Buddha's time. The Enlightened One was on very cordial terms with some of the leading monarchs of the times, whose interest and patronage early Buddhism appreciated a great deal. Many a rule of the Vinaya code was discreetly amended in deference to the convenience of kings such as Bimbisara and Pasendi, the Kosalan. And quite a few scions of royal families joined the order of monks and nuns and played a leading part in the propagation of the creed during its early critical years.

Sinhalese Buddhists state that their religion was founded by the Buddha, who was a human being and is now dead. Cognitively this position is held by every Buddhist from the most learned monk to the most ignorant layman. Yet they usually behave as if the Buddha appears to them as a powerful and omnibenevolent god, a supreme being who is still in some way present and aware. (Perhaps we might say that cognitively the Buddha is dead, but affectively he is alive.) For instance, if assailed by dangerous demons a pious Buddhist will recite the qualities of the Buddha and thus keep any malevolent forces at bay. If asked to explain the apparent inconsistency, Buddhists say that the gods and demons are restrained by respect for the Buddha—but it is respect for his memory or for his doctrine, not for his active power. Moreover, Buddhists have dealings with the Buddha in which they behave as if he were at least numinously present; in particular, offerings are made before statues of the Buddha.

The managing agency system has been the dominant form of business organization in India for over a century, yet no one has described the circumstances surrounding its first emergence. It is not difficult to understand why an aura of mystery enshrouds the early years of the system. Students of managing agency invariably have been economists. Although they feel obliged to make some reference to its historical origins, they neglect the sources where the evidence abounds. A typical statement from a recent official Indian study of managing agency reads:

Little is known about the early twilight zone of the history of our industrial development in which the managing agency system and the joint stock companies played a great part.

The Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the biggest rebellion Imperial China had ever experienced, had undoubtedly exposed the many inadequacies of the dynastic government. The decrepit state of the army was at once revealed. The Manchu banner troops had long decayed while the Chinese Army of the Green Standard (Lü-ying) had also reached its nadir at the turn of the nineteenth century. The government, therefore, had to depend more and more on local, gentry-led armies. The defeat of the main government armies in 1860 eventually forced the court at Peking to place full responsibility in the hands of these gentry-led armies, thus introducing a new phase in the war of suppression.

Views of desert regions of the world as areas with little productive use for the support of mankind have always been tempered by the optimism expressed in the phrase “to make the desert bloom like the rose.” We also know that the concept of the “Garden of Eden” was evolved in a desert environment. Thus, it is well realized that in a temperate or warm arid region, the flow of water from springs or from exotic rivers or the availability of fresh ground water derived from distant rainfall or snow-melt may create green oases of productive agriculture. One such region is China's colonial realm of Sinkiang, and especially the Tarim basin in central Asia. Here, such land and water resources presently provide some seven million people with food and materials for clothing. This also is a region with valuable unexploited mineral resources both varied and substantial.

Postwar Japanese scholarship, in its quest to explain Japan's modern history, has yet to deal adequately with the so-called right wing. Survey histories sometimes write it off as a lunatic fringe, or equate it simply with militarism and putschism. My purpose here is not to venture a total picture of the right but to present a microcosmic analysis of doctrines attributed to it through focusing on the theory of revolution formulated early in the Taishō period by Kita Ikki (1883–1937). Japanese writers regularly identify Kita as a leading rightist. Maruyama Masao refers to him as “the ideological father of Japanese fascism,” and his 1919 book on the “reorganization” of Japan (later published as Nihon kaizō hōan taikō) has been called by Kuno Osamu “the Mein Kampf of the Shõwa ultranationalist movement.”