During his eventful career in India, lasting from 1799 to 1823, Colonel James Tod collected a large number of manuscripts in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Hindi, and Gujarati. Of these the most valuable were the many historical writings— regular narratives in both prose and verse, panegyrical compositions, pedigrees, and other miscellanea—from which he derived most of the information embodied in his great work, the Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan. Most of them are in Hindi; a very few are in Sanskrit. Another group, which is not much less important, consists of metrical tales in old Hindi and Gujarati dialects, chiefly illustrative of Jain doctrine, together with some prose stories. There are also other Jain writings, viz. a few scriptures in Prakrit, commentaries upon them in Sanskrit and vernaculars, hagiological poems in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and vernaculars, and various doctrinal works. Finally there are many works representing various phases of Indian culture, e.g. Sanskrit classics and books on grammar, lexicography, astronomy, and astrology, vernacular writings on divination and farriery, etc. These manuscripts passed into the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society as a legacy from Colonel Tod, who for several years acted as the Society's librarian, and form the basis of the collection described in the following Catalogue.

In April, 1939, Professor E. H. Johnston published an article in this Journal in which he argued that there never was a Demetrias in Sind, and it is advisable to see what his evidence comes to. The new critical edition of the Mahābhārata which he cites shows that the name Dattāmitra in the epic is not that of the Yavana king, and it seems to follow that the existence of this Demetrias is no longer the certainty which historians have for some time taken it to be. But it is a long step from this to an assertion that Demetrias never existed; between absolute positive and absolute negative in history there often lie various degrees of probability, and in this case they require to be examined.

I am grateful to the Society for letting me see the above paper before publication and giving me space for a few comments. Circumstances at the moment debar me from access to libraries; and, as it is also hard to answer briefly arguments depending on assumptions which appear to me unwarranted by the available evidence, this note may be found incomplete.