Ānandavardhana has been assigned by Biihler and Jacobi to the middle of the ninth century, on the strength of Rājatarangi, v. 34, which makes him one of the ornaments of the court of Avantivarman (A.D. 855–84). The statements of Kalhana; no doubt, must be accepted with caution, but it is unlikely, as we shall see from several other considerations, that the tradition in Kāśmīr, thus embodied in the Rāja-tarangi, regarding a famous author, should have maintained a false or unfounded account. We are pretty certain of the time of Abhinavagupta, Ānandavardhana's commentator; for, as he himself states, his commentary on the Īśvara-pratyabhijñā was written in A.D. 1014–15, while his Krama-stotra was composed in A.D. 991. This would certainly place him towards the end of the tenth and the beginning of the eleventh century.

The Devanāgarī alphabet has been shown by Bühler to have been -L derived from the Brahmī, in which the earliest documents and most of Asoka's inscriptions are written. With the revival of Sanskrit learning and literature, which took place in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. under the Gupta emperors, the development of the Brahml script proceeded apace. The first step or innovation was the method adopted by which the letters were made to hang from the horizontal top-line. This line first appears to a marked degree in the period, dating from 350 after Christ, but becomes only fully developed in the scripts circa A.D. 800–1200. Thus the p of the Baijnāth Prasastī (A.D. 804) has an open top, but appears with a closed top, , in the Kanheri cave inscriptions, only to open out again in the tenth century. The character may be regarded as having become fixed in the eleventh century (vide Bhimadeva's script A.D. 1029). And similarly with other letters.

When I wrote my note on (33) , etc. (Bulletin, I, 3, p. 39), I was unaware, that Père Havret had discussed and amplified his previous translation of the passage in a small pamphlet entitled La Stèle Chrétienne de Si-ntgan-fou: quelques notes extraites d'un commentaire inédit, which was published at Leiden in 1897. Through the kindness of my friend Mr. A. C. Moule I have since had access to these notes, where it is conclusively shown that the passage in question conceals an allusion to the following words in the Slhih chou clti, spoken bv the envoys from Yüeh-chih to the Emperor Wu Ti: “Notre état est à trois cent mille li d'ici; on y observe constainment les présages célestes. Or, le vent d'est a soufflé d'après les lois harmoniques durant des centaines de décades sans discontinue; et les images azurés ont donné leur note musicale des mois entiers sans interruption. De lá, nous pûmies inférer qu'en ce même temps il se trouvait en Chine un prince vertueux.” Pére Havret then turns to the sentence in the Inscription, and interprets it in the light of his discovery: “En définitive, il faut voir dans ces nuages et dans ce vent, non point des phénomènes météorologiques qui accompagnèient le voyage d'Olopen, mais une formule flatteuse pour l'empereur T'ai-tsong dont la renommée attirait vers la Chine les prédicateurs d'Occident.” It will be seen that the compliment is delicately implied rather than actually expressed in the Chinese text, being only recognizable by one who is acquainted with the passage in the Shih chou chi. My translation, therefore, may stand; but the initial note about Kaban's forecasting of the weather will need some modification.

An interesting attempt has been made by Professor H. Lüders to vindicate for the shadow play an important place in the development of the Indian drama. The term denoting the performers of such plays he holds to have been Çaubhika, or, in vernacular form, sobhiya; they explained to the audience the shadow pictures displayed before them, and thus were precursors of the true drama. The example of Java is called into service to meet the obvious criticism that every consideration tells in favour of the view that the shadow play is later than, and based upon, the true drama.

That language is an ethnographic document of fundamental importance is a plain truism. It also hardly needs stressing that the knowledge of all aspects of tribal life, without exception, is essential to a sound knowledge of any one aspect. To omit, for instance, the study of religion, or economics, or social organization when dealing with a native society, results not only in our ignorance of the subject omitted, but also lowers the value of all that has been recorded. All aspects of tribal life play into each other; to sunder a few of them from the rest results in a mutilation of the whole, and language is not an exception in this respect. The study of the linguistic aspect is indispensable, especially if we want to grasp the social psychology of a tribe, i.e. their manner of thinking, in so far as it is conditioned by the-peculiarities of their culture. All this is clear and well known.

There is a great deal to be said for the contention that national character expresses itself in popular sayings and proverbs. That the latter are sometimes paradoxical and tend to extremes cannot be denied. Truth is, however, often seen at her best on the tight rope.

The following selection of well-known Kurdish sayings is made with a view to illustrating the character of the Kurds. As an excuse for its imperfections reference can be made to the lack of Kurdish literature and the existence of many dialects, which make it somewhat difficult for a foreigner to acquire a working knowledge of the language as a whole.

The Kurds are a mountain race, with all the characteristics of mountaineers—love of freedom, violent passions, and a clannish feeling of pride. These primary traits dispose the Kurd to fly to arms at small provocation, and engage with zest in bitter blood feuds.

[MR. L. F. TAYLOR, of the Indian Educational Service, was the official entrusted by the Government of Burma with the preparation of the gramophone records of the languages of that Province, which have lately been presented to the School of Oriental Studies. It was he, also, who prepared the valuable report on the Preparatory Stage or Linguistic Census, for the proposed linguistic survey of Burma. In the course of correspondence on these subjects, I appealed to him for help in the vexed question of the tones peculiar to these forms of speech, and he very kindly undertook a minute inquiry into the subject and forwarded to me the notes which form the body of this paper. As they were too valuable to be consigned to the obscurity of office records, with his permission I have arranged them into the form of an article. So far as I know these notes of Mr. Taylor's are the only attempts at illustrating graphically the tones of several important languages of Further India that have been published. In this connexion, I would also refer the student to Dr. C. N. Bradley's valuable articles on pp. 282 ff. of vol. xxxi (1911) of the Journal of the American Oriental Society and on pp. 39 ff. of vol. xlvi (1915) of the Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. The first deals with Siamese and the second with two Chinese dialects. In each the wave-lengths of the tones used in these languages as mechanically recorded in the Rousselot apparatus were carefully measured and plotted, forming curves or patterns of pitch which could be shown upon a chart. It is interesting to find that the results thus obtained by Dr. Bradley for Siamese closely agree with those recorded by Mr. Daniel Jones and Mr. Taylor.

Under the name of Sudanic or Negro languages are comprehended, according to the generally received terminology, the African tongues which stretch in a broad band across the continent from Cape Verd to the Great Lakes; further north they reach nearly to the Red Sea in isolated instances, and in the south to the confines of the Indian Ocean in the shape of linguistic islets whose affinities are only with difficulty recognizable. To the south of the area stretches the Bantu territory, interspersed with pigmy and Bushmen elements, of whom the latter alone have well-marked forms of speech, while the former appear to speak the tongues of Bantu neighbours, or of Sudanic tribes, who must have been their neighbours at an earlier period but have now been swallowed up in the Bantu flood. South-west of the Bantu we have the Nama languages, often classified as Hamitic.

The Gr. documents in questions are, apart from their historical interest, very valuable from the point of Iran, philology. They contain many Iran, names, whose forms truly represent the changes which their Av. or AP. forerunners went through in the early Parthian Pahl. language. Fortunately many of the names occurring in these documents are met with in the ancient Arm. literature. During the Parthian period of the history of Persia, about 250 B.C. to A.D. 226, Armenia was the apple of discord between the Parthians and the Romans, and it formed according to the fortunes of war a part of the Roman or Persian territory, or a kingdom under the suzerainty of Rome or Parthia. In consequence the Armenians came much in touch with the Parthians, from whom they borrowed a considerable number of Persian words for their language and a large number of Persian pr. names as well. Thus it is that in Arm. the intermediate forms of Iran. words, those between the A P. and the MidPers. of the Sasanian period, are to be found fossilized. Again, with an equal amount of certainty the MidPers. words of the Sasanian period are met with in Arm., viz., those which were borrowed during the Sasanian period of the history of Persia, about A.D. 226 to 631. We are thus able to trace all the changes, which the original Iran, vowels and consonants went through, from the very early A v. times down to the dawn of NP. period. Nearly all these pr. names treated in the notes are found in the works of one or more of the following Arm.]

A Fair attempt at coolness invaded the autumn evening after the day, which had been hot enough for a Continental mid-summer. In France the climate can do these things and one gets used to it; and so in the evening of a late autumn day I was comfortable in tropical clothing, after a day worthy a country of a more easterly situation on the map.