To Sir William Jones appears to belong the honor of first since the beginning of Sanskrit studies suggesting that Pythagoras derived from India the groundwork of his philosophy. His treatment of the matter, however, is inimportant compared with that that the Colebrooke, who discussed the question of the relation of Sāṃkhya and Phyhagoreanism in some detail and with his usual masteryof material. As often, his treatment remained for many years definitive; his arguments were repeated and extended, but nothing solid was added to the foundation which he had laid until in 1884 Dr. Leopold von Schroeder published his admirable study on Pythagoras und die Inder.

In the series of papers of which this is the first, I hope to give, as opportunity allows, as full as account as possible of the contents of the Bhakta-māla of Nābhādāsa, a work of which the importance has long been recognized, but the difficulties of which have hitherto repelled serious students. It is acknowledged as the great authority in regard to the history of the saints of the Bhāgavata reformation started by Rāmānuja, Madhva, and other, in the twelfth century A.D., and also, incidentally, as a compendium of the tenets of that religion. Indeed, a somewhat minute study of the work has convinced me that it is impossible to understand the various phases of modern Hinduism as professed by the Vaiṣṇava sects without a knowledge of its contents.

This inscription has been known for a long time. The stone on which it is engraved was discovered by General Court in one of the smaller Stၫpas surrounding the large Stūpa at Māṇikiāla Rāwal piṇḍī District, and was afterwards sent to Paris, where it is kept now in the Bibliothèque Nationale. It closed the upper opening of the relic-chamber, the incised face being turned to the interior.

This fact that in the fourteenth century of our era the Pāṇḍya country with its capital Madura was ruled over by Musalmān princes, is known from the Travels of Ibn Batūta. The Madras Journal of Literature and Science for 1888–9 contained an article by Mrs. L. Fletcher on “Ibn Batūtah in Southern India”, to which Mr. L. White King and Captain R. H. C. Tufnell appended a “Note on the Coins of the Muhammadan Viceroys in Southern India” (p. 55 ff.).

Christian Maximillian Habicht was born at Breslau in 1775. He went to Paris in 1797 as Secretary of the Prussian Legation, and remained there until March, 1807, when he returned to Germany. During this ten years he studied Arabic under De Sacy and a Father Raphael, of Cairo, then teaching Arabic in Paris, and lived for some years in the same house with a certain Mordecai ibn an-Najjār, of Tunis, a Jew apparently from his (Epistolœ Arabicœ, pp. 2 f.; Breslau text, vol.i, p.iii).

There is a close affinity between the aboriginal tribes of Sumatra and the Sakais of Malakka, so well studied by a long series of English authors. From the long list of eminent works about these interesting peoples I can cite only a few of the most important. A complete bibliography is to be found in the standard work of Skeat and Blagden, The Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula, which can be regarded as an encyclopædia on this matter.

In a review of Professor Louis de la Vallée Poussin's book Le Védisme, p. 472 of this Journal, Mr. A. Berriedale Keith makes the following remark: “He [Poussin] is inclined with Barth and Winternitz not to reject as wrong Jacobi's great chronological argument: we think this is to be much too favourable to it. It cannot survive Whitney, Thibaut, and Oldenberg's onslaught.” As Mr. Keith probably does not stand alone in this opinion, may I be allowed to say a few words on this head?