The Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. x, nr: 36, pp. 263–309 (Colombo, 1890), contains an article by Donald Ferguson entitled “Captain João Eibeiro: his work on Ceylon and the French translation thereof by the Abbé Le Grand”. The present article summarizes what has been discovered about Ribeiro and his work since that date, and makes a brief comparison of his Fatalidade Historica da ilha de Ceilão with the more celebrated Historical Relation of the island of Ceylon by Captain Robert Knox.

Professor Edgerton has offered us in his recent work on Buddhist Sanskrit (a monument to almost twenty years' labour) a material of delightful richness. It required both courage to undertake such a work and great persistence to carry it through. No doubt each reader will at first look eagerly to see how the cruces which have long baffled him have been resolved here; then to see how much new matter is offered in the elucidation of texts where he has himself after long searching been able to gather up some small amount of the widely scattered evidence. He may even venture to estimate how much of the harvest has been garnered and how much still remains to be brought in.

In 1930 Pandit Kameshwar Dayal, then Deputy Collector at Cawnpore, published a note on a mound situated on a bend of the river Rind about two miles to the east of Bhikdeo, an important village in the Derapur tahsil of the Cawnpore district. The mound covers an area of about 35 bighas and rises to a height of 35 feet. It contained large bricks measuring 30 in. by 20 in. by 4½ in., evidently used for building purposes, and had yielded beads, coins, and other objects. Among the coins recovered from the site were copper coins of the Mathura Satrap Hagamasha. From these finds Pt. Dayal concluded that the mound of Ujjhān was a site of archæological interest which would repay excavation and ought to be declared protected under the Ancient Monuments Act. These recommendations however do not appear to have been acted upon.

The Pahlavi text presented here has already been published, summarized, and translated (once with and once without transcription). Its contents cannot be said to be of great value, since no new light is thrown on the main theme—the advent of Shah Vahrām after the end of the Zaratušt-millennium. Yetthe text deserves to be treated again, if only for the fact, hitherto unnoticed, that it is a poem with rhyme. This fact must be welcomed for several reasons: firstly, as being of interest in itself; secondly as providing fresh material for the general study of prosody in pre-Islamic times; and finally as affording valuable help for the correct interpretation of the text.

Of the Dharmasamuccaya, a collection of stanzas from the Saddharmasmṛtyupasthānā Sūtra and the only part of that Siitra known to survive in Sanskrit, the first five chapters were published in 1946 by the late Mr. Lin Li-Kouang from a modern Devanāgarī transcription of a presumably still extant twelfth-century Nepalese MS. From this deeply corrupt source (how far the corruptions derive from the original and how far from the copy I cannot say) it would be impossible to construct anything like a satisfactory text were it not for the existence of a Tibetan version of the Siitra in the Kanjur. The relevant verses in this and in two out of three extant Chinese versions were extracted by Lin Li-Kouang from their prose environment and accompany the Sanskrit in his edition. But even with these aids many uncertainties remain. For the Tibetans were evidently working from a text which had already suffered some deterioration and their renderings must be used with more than ordinary circumspection. Of the two published Chinese versions the first contains some helpful indications but, as is usually the case, its value as a clue to the original is small in comparison with the more literal Tibetan. The second is so free as to be nearly useless.

Orthodoxy, as a rule, makes less appeal to the imagination than heresy, and this holds true of seventeenth-century Sumatran Suiism as of mysticism elsewhere. Some of the works of Shamsu'1-Dīn and Hamzah, the foremost exponents of the heterodox pantheistic mysticism of that time, have been published. al-Rānīrī, as an accomplished polemist, cuts a colourful figure whose Tibyān fī ma'rifat al-adyān has been photographically reproduced. The works of ‘Abd al-Ra'ūf, of Singkel, apart from Rinkes’ thesis and one or two monographs have been comparatively neglected. This neglect is not surprising. His works are largely translations and his favourite subject, the dhikr (recitation), does not arouse such a sjympathetic interest as the metaphysical speculations of the heterodox which find an echo in form as well as substance in the history of Western thought.