The Shadharátu'l-Dhahab fi akhbári man dhahab, briefly described in the J.R.A.S. for 1899, p. 911 seq., is a biographical dictionary of persons who died between the years 1 and 1000 A.H., of which, besides the MS. in my possession, the only copy known to me is one belonging to the Khedivial Library in Cairo (Catalogue, vol. v, p. 72). Some idea of its extent may be gathered from the fact that the articles printed below form approximately a 200th part of the whole work. It is unquestionably a compilation of great value, the author, Abu'l-Faláḥ ‘Abdu’l-Ḥayy, having derived his material from many excellent sources which are not easily accessible to the modern Orientalist. When I first described the MS., I hoped that it might be possible to publish one or two of the longer articles by way of specimen. The names of ‘Umar Ibnu’l-Fáriḍ and Muḥiyyu'ddín Ibnu'l-'Arabí, whose lives I have selected for this purpose, are too celebrated to require any further introduction.

I sacrifice to the Water Ardvīsūr, the clear (or pure); [its (i.e. her) pureness is this, that in consequence of her purity her place is on the star track], (2) the full forth-flowing (one), [that is to say, she penetrates to every single place], the healing (one), [that is to say, she thoroughly heals a case (literally ‘a matter’)], the Demonsevered (one), [that is to say, in no connection with her are the Demons], the one of Aūharmazd's Lore, [that is to say, her religious Lore (her Dēnā) is that of Aūharmazd (and not that of the Devas, meaning that her sanctity stands in connection with the Dēn of Ahura)],

The history of the sixth century in Northern India is extremely difficult. As the Gupta empire fell to pieces petty states arose, of which but scanty records are available in the few inscriptions so far discovered. A recent find of coins seems to throw fresh light on the period, and in particular to afford material for fixing dates more exactly than has been possible hitherto.

The Arabic MS. Add. 7,320, Cat. cccvii, is unidentified. It is a historical fragment beginning with the necrology of the year 58 A.H., and extending to the succession of Ma'mūn in 198 A.H. It contains 162 folios of 23 lines to the page: there is an omission at fol. 49a, 1. 10, where the narrative passes suddenly from the notice of Anas b. Mālik, under 92 A.H., to the killing of the poet Waḍḍāḥ al-Yaman by Walīd (as told in the Kitāb al-Aāni, vi, 39, 1. 9, a.f.), and at fol. 101 comes a gap of 23 years, the text breaking off in the midst of the obituary notice of the Caliph Saffāḥ, and resuming on fol. 102 in that of the poet Ḥammād al-Rāwiya, in a story on him by al-Dāraquṭni (Brockelmann, i, 165) quoted from his Kitāb al - Taṣḥīḥ (Ḥ. Kh., No. 9,975). Thence the text proceeds uninterruptedly to the point where it breaks off early in the year 198 A.H.

In my previous note on page 655 ff. above, I have given the narrative of the Mahāparinibbāna-Sutta about the cremation of the corpse of Buddha and the original distribution and enshrining of his corporeal relics. We come now to the tradition about the subsequent fate of the eight deposits of those relics, which were placed in Stūpas or memorial mounds at the localities shewn in the list given on page 671. And we take this matter in the order, as closely as we can determine it, of the dates of the writings from which we gather the tradition ; which, however, is of course not necessarily the order in which the tradition was developed.

In the Vedas and the earlier medical works there occur some anatomical terms which have never, or at least not usually, been correctly understood, but which, on reference to the actual human skeleton, can, with much probability, be identified.

One of the more interesting features of the Great Vehicle, or Mahāyāna School of Buddhism, is the system of the Three Bodies. Being at first a ‘ Buddhology,’ a speculative doctrine of the Buddhahood, this system was afterwards made to cover the whole field of dogmatic, of ontology, and was in particular substituted for the antiquated ‘ dependent origination’ (pratītyasamutpāda). At first the Buddhas alone had three ‘ Bodies’ ; afterwards the whole universe was looked upon as residing in or made of the Bodies. Later, or by parallel development, new mythological, mystic, and physiological reveries caused serious alterations of the primitive ‘ trinitarian’ form, and in particular the addition of two more Bodies to the ‘ classical’ ones ; and the Tantric school, in its own fanciful, mystic, and theurgic way, reduced the speculative system to a mere practical method of Yoga.