The full title of this little work, which occupies 19 pages in 8vo, is as follows:—

Verdadeira e exacta Noticia dos progressos de Thamas Kouli Khan Scach da Persia no Imperio do Gram Mogô, Escrita na lingua Persiana em Delhy em 21 de Abril de 1739, e mandada a Roma por Mons. Voulton.

Acrecentada com outras chegadas por varias partes, com hum Mapa do Thesouro do Gram Mogôr levado a Hispahan pelo mesmo Schach. Dadas a luz na lingua Portugueza.

In the great mass of material already collected for the study of African folk-lore—to which fresh additions are daily being made— we do not find any considerable number of what may be called heroic legends. Yet some there are, as in the traditions of Kintu and other early kings of Uganda, in the tale of Mbega, current in Usambara, and probably many others, as yet unrecorded.

Le grand homme d'état des commencements de la dynastie mongole fut un personnage énigmatique auquel les Chinois donnent le nom de Yaloutchhou Thsaī; les chroniques du Céleste Empire racontent qu'il était de la race des Tatars Khitan, et qu'il appartenait à la famille impériale des Liao, laquelle avait été dépossédée par les Tatars Kin, les Altan Khagan, auxquels Tchinkkiz fit une guerre sans merci pour s'emparer de leurs possessions du Nord de la Chine.

The jungle tribes (or, as the Malays style them, Orang Utan) of the Malay Peninsula are not altogether an unknown quantity from the point of view of anthropology and linguistics. A number of scholars and travellers have devoted themselves to the study of them, the most important being Hrolf Vaughan Stevens, R. Martin, W. W. Skeat, the leader of the Cambridge expedition, Annandale, and Robinson.

During the Third Session of the Oriental Conference held in Madras (December, 1924) I had the opportunity of examining cursorily some newly acquired manuscripts on Sanskrit Alamkāraśāstra in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library. I propose in this paper to note briefly certain pieces of information which I have been able to gather from them, as it was too late to incorporate them in the second volume of my Sanskrit Poetics (to which I refer below as SP.).

The School of Oriental Studies has recently acquired a manuscript containing the complete text of the Jānakīharana—twenty cantos in all—and from it I publish the following sarga. As only cantos 1–15 have hitherto been edited, the contribution here presented should be of some interest, although the lack of other MSS. makes it impossible to produce a definitive critical text.

The Campū-prabandha Ajāmila-mōksa is a little literary work belonging to Travancore. In publishing it I am relying on a Malayalam manuscript written on cadjan leaves, which I obtained from Mr. Tāzhaman Sankarar Tantri of Chenganur in the Travancore State. A piece of poetry interspersed with prose is called a Campū-prabandha, or Prabandha, in the Kērala country.

Śankaráchárya, the great philosopher, the founder of Vedic Monism, the avowed and uncompromising opponent of Buddhism, the commentator on Sutras of Bádaráyana, the Upanisads and the Bhagavadgītá, flourished at the end of the eighth century A.D. His life has been written by his direct disciple Ánandagiri, in Sanskrit prose and also by Sāyanāchārya, the great Sanskrit scholar, who also held the proud position of minister to the state of Vijayānagar.

Wāman Pandit was born in the second half of the seventeenth century (the definite date is not obtainable) at the village of Kumthe in the Satārā, district of the Bombay Presidency. According to the latest research work of the Bharata Itīhāsa Samśodhak Mandali of Poona, Wāman was a native of Bijāpore. In his early days he received some training in Sanskrit from his father, who was the village-astrologer by profession, and who had considerable knowledge of Sanskrit. When about 18 he went to Benāres, the centre of Hindu learning and also the most sacred place of the Hindus. He was accompanied by his wife, an incident which shows that his parents were dead at that time. He applied himself rigorously to the study of Sanskrit for not less than twelve years, and having completed his education, in all departments of knowledge, he returned to his native place.

In the phonological development of a language the shortening and loss of vowels are usually ascribed to the absence of stress-accent on the syllables containing those vowels. When in their study of Prakrit Phonology Drs. Pischel and Jacobi found numerous instances of the loss and shortening of vowels, they explained them in the light of stress-accent. The one supposed that the musical accent of Vedic also acted like stress, while the other assumed that after the pitch-accent had died out, a stress-accent developed in Sanskrit and Prakrit which was placed on the penultimate or ante-penultimate syllable as in Latin. Now about the nature, history, and even the very existence of stress-accent in PI or its subsequent stages nothing certain is known. The Prātiśākhyas and Śiksās are silent on this point. The reason of their silence may be that perhaps the stress-accent originally fell on the same syllable as the pitch-accent and was not strong enough to draw attention. The following remarks of Dr. P. Giles and Professor D. Jones lend great support to the probability of this surmise:—

It is often said that Portuguese dental t, d, remain dental in India and that English alveolar t, d, become cerebral. It would follow that words like kaptān and botal and haspatāl, usually stated to be from English, must be Portuguese. The question cannot be disposed of so simply; there seem to have been cross influences at work, and sometimes there are different forms of the same word. See S. R. Dalgado's works passim for valuable suggestions.

Bābū Śyām Sundae Dās, President of the Nāgarī Pracārinī Sabhā, has recently written a book entitled Bhāsā Vigyān (Benares, Sāhitya-Ratn-Mālā, 1920, pp. 6 + v + 388 + xxii). In this work he has collected a large amount of material for his students in the Central Hindu University.

I here give a translation, abridged in places, of certain pages relating to Kharī Bolī in his interesting account of Hindī.