Some time ago I ventured to print a monograph on the Avars in the Journal of the Asiatic Society. I should now like to continue the story by analyzing the difficult ethnological and historical problems involved in discriminating the races which occupied the Steppes of South-eastern Europe before the arrival of the Avars. The question has exercised many inquirers, nor does it seem to me that a final and definite answer can be reached, but we can at all events secure a tentative solution of the problem.

A pseudo-Aristotelian treatise called de pomo et morte incliti principis philosophorum Aristotelis has been printed several times in Europe, the earliest editions being without place or date. This work is a Latin translation of a Hebrew tract bearing the name “The Book of the Apple,” the translator being Manfred, King of Sicily (ob. 1266), or, as Steinschneider suggests, a Jew employed by him. The Hebrew text professes to be a translation from the Arabic made by R. Abraham B. Hisdai, an author who flourished at the end of the thirteenth century. There are MSS. of B. Hisdai's work in the Vatican and at Oxford, and it has been repeatedly printed, first at Venice, 1519. It was republished with a new Latin translation and a copious but irrelevant commentary by J. J. Losius, at Giessen, in 1706.

I have received several interesting communications on my article, published in our Journal for last July, on the Sects of the Buddhists. The Rev. J. E. Carpenter has given me additional figures in Yuan Thsang which had escaped my notice. These numbers bring up the totals given by the Chinese author of the adherents of the different schools, as summarized on p. 420, to 200,000 instead of 182,000. But they leave the conclusion, which was drawn from those numbers, as it stood.

It is a far cry from Gotama the Buddha to Mr. William Morris; but it will be the object of these pages to establish the succession, not apostolic but literary, linking together the Victorian poet and the Indian sage of the fifth century B.C. Like the author of “The Earthly Paradise,” Gotama had an ear for

The gentle music of the bygone years,

Long past to us with all their hopes and fears.

The occasion of the Bab's writing this Commentary is thus described in the Tárikh-i-Jadid (BBP. 5, f. 106a; Or. 2942, ff. 103a–103b):

If there be at sunrise stripes of red light in shape of fish and at sunset red rays of light stretching in diverging stripes from the west, Dunk says to Bhadli that rivers shall have foams.

Having recently received from Mandalay through the kindness of an uncle, several interesting and important Buddhist MSS. in Pāli, Burmese and Shan, I ventureto lay before the Society a Collection of Kammavācās, some of which, though known to European scholars, have hitherto remained inedited.

The Institut des Langues Orientales of St. Petersburg has an admirable custom, which it were well if other similar institutions would imitate. From time to time it publishes, under the title of Collections Scientifiques, not mere catalogues of recent acquisitions, but full accounts of the more interesting manuscripts which have been added to its library, with copious extracts, tables of contents, and critical notes. The sixth volume of these Collections has lately appeared in two parts, of which the second is almost entirely filled with a description, from the pen of Baron Rosen, of certain Bábi MSS. acquired by the Institut. It is this second part of vol. vi that I propose specially to discuss here, but of the Bábí texts contained in vol. i (published in 1877) I shall also have something to say.

The subject of the present paper is the translation of one of the most interesting and important tablets that have been discovered within the last twenty years—interesting not only from a linguistic point of view, but also as casting new light on the history of Western Asia, about 1500 years before our era, and as showing the manners of the age and the political relations of Egypt with Asiatic countries. It also informs us of the language spoken in Armenia and in Syria, and of the extent of the Hittite dominions before the fall of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty.

By the Scientific Expedition to the Northern Etbai, despatched by his Highness the Khedive in the beginning of the year, that part of the eastern desert of Egypt which lies south of a line between Kina and Kosair and reaches rather below the twenty-fourth parallel of latitude, was rapidly examined and surveyed. The map is in the hands of the engraver of the Royal Geographical Society; the geology exhibited in a map and sections is before the Geological Society; and a map of the antiquities is attached to the present memoir. The country embraces an area of 23,000 square miles of mountain and desert, and is called by the inhabitants the Northern Etbai.

Of Aššurbêlkala, son and successor of the first Tiglath pileser, we know little. The so-called synchronous history devotes a few lines to his reign, from which, however, we learn nothing more than that in his time the peoples of Assyria and Babylon were united in the bonds of friendship aud alliance, and that he took to wife a Babylonian lady, daughter of the upstart Rammanâpluiddinna, King of Babylon (W. A. I., ii. 65, 25). Two only of Aššurbêlkala's inscriptions seem to have come down to us. Of these the more important runs in seven partly defaced lines across the back of a nude female torso carved in stone a little under life-size. This monument—of the highest interest from an archaeological point of view—was found at Kouyunjik, and is now preserved (No. 849) in the British Museum.

This translation has been made from a Burmese copy printed at the Hanthawati Press, Rangoon, but there is nothing to show whence the text was taken. I have also made use ofa manuscript taken from the Mandalay Library, and now at the India Office. The gāthā, which in many places seem to be imperfect, are not given in the shape of gāthā in the Mandalay copy. In some cases the Burmese translation was redundant, and in others defective, so in translating them, though not a Pāli scholar, I havedone my best to stick to the Pāli text, receiving some valuable assistance from Prof. Rhys Davids. The Jātaka is No. 547 in the Ceylon List, and what is called one of the Greater Jātaka, probably composed at a late date, as it refers to the Pandara Jātaka, No. 521 [vol. v. p. 75, of Fausböll], which I have translated in a note from another Burmese source.

1. The reasons which induce me to preserve the spelling Hiuen-Tsang instead of adopting the newly-proposed Yüan Chwang are that the latter is erroneous and without any standing whatever, while the other, besides its long acceptance by European scholars, is more true to history.