In general outline the pattern of government in Outer Mongolia during the Manchu dyasty in not unfamiliar and it is a well-known fact that there was no judiciary as such, the administration of justice being only one of the various duties of local officials at various levels. A certain amount of work has been done on problems of law and justice, but there remain many problems of detail to be both raised and commented upon. Two lines of inquiry are open. On the one hand it is instructive to see how the processes of investigation and trial worked—how an alleged offence came to offical notice, who investigated, how evidence was recorded, what instances a case passed through, and how, and on what legal basis, it was disposed of. Other closely related technical questions concern the form and language of official documents. On the other hand, examination of criminal cases will afford insight into the social status, living conditions, and perhaps the psychology, of the persons concerned. It is in fact largely through the medium of legal and other official documents that we shall glean whatever information there is to be had about the day to day lives of individual persons in Mongolia under the Manchus, since other sources of information—journalism, biography, fiction, letters, memoirs, and so on—are non-existent. Apart from reports of criminal cases, some of which have been dealt with in model fashion by Klaus Sagaster, much information can be found in other types of official document, such as complaints submitted by ordinary people against officials, but in the present article we shall be concerned exclusively with the report of one criminal case dating from the late eighteenth century.

Over Northern India from Delhi to Patna, there is no more popular story than that contained in the cycle of ballads called the Ālh-Khand. This is a long epic poem in twenty-three cantos, composed in the Bunēlī dialect of Western Hindī, telling in rude ballad metre of the exploits of the famous Ālhā and Ūdan, and sung by wandering minstrels known as Ālhā-gānēwālās, or “Singers of Ālhā”. Up to the middle of the last century the cycle does not appear to have ever been reduced to writing, as was the lot of the more elaborate productions of the professional Rajput bards, and few, if any, of its reciters are masters of the whole; but in the eighteen-sixties Mr. C. A. Elliott (afterwards Sir Charles Elliott), when stationed at Farrukhabad, near the ancient city of Kanauj, found three or four of these minstrels, and employed one of them to compile a complete set of the twentythree ballads from their joint memories. The poem thus rescued was printed, and its great popularity is shown by the fact that it has passed through many editions, and can be purchased in the bazaars written either in the Nāgarī or in the Persian character.

RajaRamRoy, the adopted son of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, went to England with his father. He remained there for several years after his father's death at Bristol in 1833.

In August 1835 Hobhouse, the President of the Board of Control, recorded that he had received an application on behalf of Raja Ram, ‘requesting that the opportunity may be afforded him previously to his return to his native country of acquiring an insight into the mode in which the public business is transacted in England’. The request appealed to Hobhouse, with his Whig and liberal sympathies, and at his recommendation Raja Ram was appointed an extra clerk in the offices of the Board of Control at a salary of £100 a year.

Among the well known stories of Indian mythology there is one relating how the god Mahādeva (Śiva) became four-faced and how Indra acquired a thousand eyes. When the divine maiden (divyakanyā) Tilottamā circumambulated the gods, the eyes of all save Pitāamaha (Brahmā) followed her, whence the multiplication of faces and eyes. Indeed, the great epic relates that upon orders from Brahmā, she, consisting of a mass of gems (ratnasaṃghātamayī), was originally fashioned by Viśvakarman. In Indian mythology the figure of Tilottamā is therefore that of the beauty of woman incarnate.

Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824–73) wrote Meghanādbadhkāvya‘ The death of Meghanād’, a nine-canto epic, in 1861. Being a Rāma story, the poem naturally owes much of its substance to the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, which is represented in Sanskrit by Vālmīki's mahākāvya and in Bengali by Krittibās's work; but it differs from that tradition, widely and in a most original way, in the characterization of the persons, the selection and presentation of the episodes, and above all in sentiment and sympathy. This divergence was the result of deliberate choice. ‘I despise Ram and his rabble (i.e. the monkeys); but the idea of Ravan elevates and kindles my imagination’ Datta wrote to R. N. Basu. In other letters he gave further indications of his thinking about the approach to his subject. ‘I mean to give free scope to my Inventing powers and to borrow as little as I can from Vahniki’; and,' If the father of our poetry (i.e. Vāhmīki) had given Ram human companions I could have made a regular Iliad of the death of Meghanad.

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.

It has always been said of Mehri that it has no dual forms of the verb. Thus Bittner, in what seems to be the most recent statement on the subject, says, discussing Śḥeri dual forms, that they ‘umso interessanter sind, als das Mehri im Bereiche des Zeitwortes keinen Dual besitzt’. It had, however, been suggested tentatively by Leslau, and later more positively by Wagner, that Ḥarsūsi (Ḥarsi) had dual forms of the verb.

The amirate of Mecca was established by sharifs of Hasanid ancestry in the middle of the fourth century a. h./tenth century a.d. The territory traditionally under its direct control included the holy city of Mecca and its immediate hinterland, the nearby hill town of Ṭā'if, and the Red Sea port of Jedda. In addition, the sharifs often exercised a tenuous hold over certain tribal areas in the Sarāt Mountains south of Ṭa'if, as well as the coastal plain south of Jedda, known as the Tihāma.

The gerund here studied is a grammatical form of great interest on account of its phonological variations and the wide range of its syntactical relationships. It occurs in the single form, gide, in a strengthened form, giderek, and in a pair form, gide gide. We find it as an independent gerund and in verbal combinations which vary from mere association to complete fusion, such as gidememek and gideyor (gidiyor). It also has a tendency to become specialized in use as a post-gerund, and numerous particles have originated in this way. It has had a long history, being one of the basic grammatical forms of Turkish, a common feature of the Turkish family of languages from the time of the early inscriptions of northern Asia. In Ottoman Turkish its importance (except in the -erek and pair forms) has gradually declined during the last 500 years, and it is now used only to a very limited extent; but in Old Ottoman it was fairly widely employed, and the texts which have survived provide ample material for study. It is, however, a complicated study. In the work which has been done it would seem that investigators have usually relied on insufficient data, or have applied methods unsuitable for this case. For example, the method of general comparison between Ottoman on the one hand and various speech forms such as Uighur, Chaghatai, and modern Anatolian dialects on the other, cannot give satisfactory results. There are too many unknown factors, too many imponderables. Such a procedure inevitably leads to the comparison of mere isolated examples which do not really prove anything. I have therefore confined myself to Old Ottoman, and my method has been to take whole texts and collect and classify all the examples of this gerund which they contain. This is laborious, but it produces results which cannot be obtained in any other way.

With a view to the necessities as well as the possible problems of a document-based administration, this paper approaches the area of conflict between standardization and flexibility in the production of administrative documents in ancient China. Recently published sources from the imperial Qin period (221–207 bce) have provided the opportunity to compare administrative documents excavated at Liye with standards regulating their production. With the help of two case studies, the paper explores to what extent official document standards were implemented in everyday practice or purposefully neglected in ancient Qianling county. It also discusses which standards were followed more closely than others, and what might be the reasons behind this. Shedding light on the large grey zone between faithful adherence and complete neglect, the paper suggests that officials chose a pragmatic way influenced by both economic considerations informed by the local circumstances and the requirements imposed by the central government.