“ Whosoever is harmonically composed delights in harmony; which makes me much distrust the symmetry of those heads which declaim against all Church-Musick. For my own part, not only from my obedience but my particular Genius, I do embrace it: for even that vulgar and Tavern-Musick, which makes one man merry, another mad, strikes in me a deep fit of devotion and a profound contemplation of the First Composer.” This is the confession of Sir Thomas Browne, and in that confession races the farthest apart join. The influence of music on the soul, the emotions it stirs, the fears and hopes it excites, all peoples, all climates, all ages have known. The negro at his camp-meeting, the darwīsh at his dhikr, are here kin with the English scholar and physician. For him it may not have been such a cataleptic ecstasy as befalls the negro or the darwīsh, but the cause was one and the essential nature. All religions have drawn strength and exaltation from this which lies at the root of all religion; it has ever kindled and fed the flame of devotion. The one could picture it to himself as “ a sensible fit of that harmony which intellectually sounds in the ears of God” ; the other can but ignorantly feel it working on his heart and soul, and sweeping him far from all the bonds of mind and thought. The unknown opens before him and clothes itself with his fancy.

The history of this little-known work is remarkable. No manuscript of it has yet been discovered, and on the continent of India the only traces of its existence consist in the facts that a few of its verses are quoted in two Sanskrit anthologies, the Çārṅgadharapaddhati and the Subhāṣitāvalī, and in the Aucityavicāracarcā of Kṣemendra, and that the author is coupled with Kālidāsa in a memorial verse of Rājaçekhara—

Jānakīharaṇaṃ kartuṃ Raghuvaṃçe sthite sati

kaviḥ Kumāradāsaç ca Rāvaṇaç ca yadi kṣamaḥ.

In a later number of this Journal I hope to give a summary account of the Cosmography known as the Nuzhat -al-Ḳulūb or “Heart's Delight” by Ḥamd-Allah Mustawfi, more especially indeed of the geographical part of that compilation, and this will serve as a supplement to the paper recently given us by Mr. E. G. Browne on the historical work written by this same Persian author, called the Tārīkh-i-Guzīdah. My summary, however, not being as yet quite ready for printing, I take this occasion to publish some preliminary notes on the vexed question of the older capitals of Kirmān, with a brief reference to the other chief cities of the province, since the account written by Ḥamd-Allah appears likely to prove useful in understanding the description of Kirmān given in the Travels of Marco Polo.

The impressions of inscriptions represented, on very greatly reduced scales, in the accompanying collotype plate by Mr. W. Griggs were sent for publication to Dr. M. A. Stein by Captain A. H. McMahon, Major Deane's successor on the Malakand and Political Agent for Swat, Dir, and Chitral. It was Dr. Stein's intention to publish them in continuation of the series of inscriptions in unknown characters sent to him by Major Deane, and described by him in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1898, p. 1). The preparations for his tour to Khotan did not, however, allow him the leisure to carry this design into effect, and the impressions were forwarded to me with the request that I would superintend their publication during his absence.

Ever since an accidental discovery, some thirty-five years ago, at Yōtkan, a village of the Borazān tract, disclosed remains of the ancient capital of Khotan, the layers of its débris, deeply buried under alluvial soil, have been regularly mined and washed for ‘treasure’ by the villagers. The great mass of the highly interesting finds of ancient art pottery, engraved stones, and early Khotan coins with Kharoṣṭhī-Chinese legends, which have recently been so thoroughly examined in Dr. Hoernle's report on the “British Collection of Central-Asian Antiquities,” has come from this site. The detailed examination of the great excavations made in the course of the treasure - seeking operations furnished interesting evidence as to the way in which those remains are embedded in layers of decomposed rubbish, evidently the accumulations of centuries. It also showed conclusively that the layer of earth (loess), from 9 to 20 feet deep at various points, which covers these ‘culture-strata,’ is due solely to silt deposit, the necessary result of intensive irrigation, and not to any great flood or similar catastrophe such as has been assumed by some earlier visitors of the site.

In my note on the above subject which appeared in the Royal Asiatic Society's Journal for 1895 (Vol. XXVII, pp. 895–898), I brought to notice the existence in Ceylon of several ancient inscriptions in Southern Maurya characters (Brāhmī lipi), which read from right to left. I stated further that “this oft repeated peculiarity of so many inscriptions certainly cannot be merely accidental or due to the ignorance of the inscribers; the more so, because of the important fact that the anomaly is to be met with only in the most ancient inscriptions in the Southern Aśoka character.” I hope before long to obtain ink ‘estampages’ of some of these from the indefatigable Archæological Commissioner in Ceylon, Mr. H. C. P. Bell, to whom should be given the credit of first suggesting a reading of one of them from right to left. Facsimiles will, in due course, be included in the forthcoming “Epigraphia Zeylanica.”