When the Island of Bombay was included as an item in the dowry of the Portuguese Princess Catherine on her marriage to King Charles II, Lord Clarendon, who as Lord High Chancellor had a principal share in the negotiation for the marriage, is alleged to have referred to “the Island of Bombay with the towns and castles thereon, which are within a little distance from Brazil”. This assertion may fit in with the belief that has been sometimes expressed that Great Britain acquired her Empire in a fit of absence of mind. It can, however, have no foundation in fact. There was a great deal of give and take in the Contract for the marriage. Portugal received a body of English troops to protect her from the attacks of the Dutch; England relinquished any claim upon Ceylon, an undertaking faithfully observed, though it did not prevent the Dutch from ousting the Portuguese from that Island. For this assistance England received an adequate return. Portugal resigned her claim to Tangier, and gave up her holding in Bombay. The value of the harbour of Bombay had already been recognized by the Directors of the East India Company in London, and by its factors at Surat. It is absurd to suppose that Clarendon was not fully informed of the situation and the value of this important item in the bargain. Apart from any other source of information he had before him the letter discussed below from an impartial observer.

There came into my hands last year a packet of old letters written in the latter end of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century mostly by members of the Irish family of Purefoy whose home was at Woodfield, near Eyrecourt, in the Co. Galway. Apart from those of purely domestic interest, there are a number written from India by James Purefoy who spent most of his life in the East as a merchant-ship-officer and trader. He went out to India in 1792 and did not return home for twenty-seven years. His extant letters were written either to his sister Mary or to her husband Robert Turbett, a Dublin merchant. Few as they are, they give a realistic if prosaic picture of the ups and downs of a merchant seaman's life during his inevitable long years of exile from his native land.

The not inconsiderable quantity of fine Islamic glass surviving to-day includes very few signed pieces. A list of those bearing the names of their makers has recently been published by Prof. L. A. Mayer, who called for additional information, his researches having produced only eight master-signatures. The last two of these do not concern us here; (i) 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ar-Ramakī (or Zamakī) signed two lamps for a Mamlūk mosque founded in 730/1330, and (ii) Serkhosh Ibrāhīm was responsible for the glass windows in a mosque of Sulaiman the Magnificent (1557). The material reviewed in the present paper is limited to the period ending with the Fatimid dynasty.

The variety of yamakas in the OJR is roughly restricted to seven main types. The number of yamaka-stanzas is very considerable, about 240. Their distribution over the whole poem seems to be rather unequal, but this lack of balance can be ascribed to the presence of three extended episodes. (1) Sarga XVI.1–14 describes the building of the damconnection (setubandha) between the continent of India and the island of Lĕṅkā, between Mount Mahendra and Mount Suwela; the rest of the sarga (15–47) counts some twenty yamaka-stanzas devoted to a description of the loveliness of Mount Suwela. (2) The description of The Paradise on Earth in Restored Lĕṅkā, XXIV.97–123, consists nearly exclusively of yamakas. (3) The Aerial Flight from Lĕṅkā, to Ayodhyā by Heavenly Chariot Puṣpaka (XXIV.253–XXVI.9) consists of nearly nothing else. Once these passages are lifted from the Table, yamakas appear to be scattered more or less equally over a majority of sargas; we find the yamaka-form often continued in some consecutive stanzas.

The Karma-pa sect, an important offshoot of the bKa'-rgyud-pa, derives from dPal Chos-gyi-grags-pa, generally known as Dus-gsummkhyen-pa, who was born in A.D. 1110 at Dre-śod in East Tibet. He was, by some accounts, the first Lama to originate a continuous line of reincarnations lasting to the present day—a claim which is contested by the Lamas of 'Bri-khuṅ. At the age of 30 Dus-gsum-mkhyen-pa became the principal disciple of sGam-po-pa, himself the chief disciple of rJe-btsun Mid-la (Mi-la-ras-pa), and so entered the direct doctrinal succession from Mar-pa, the founder of the bKa'-rgyud-pa sect. A pious explanation of the name Karma-pa is that an assembly of gods (lha) and Dakini bestowed on Dus-gsummkhyen-pa, in his sixteenth year, knowledge of the past, present, and future—together with a magical black mitre woven from the hair of a million mKha'-'gro-ma (angels or fairies). That story is found in vol Pa of the Chos-'byuṅ of dPa'-bo gTsug-lag; but however early the name Karma-pa came into existence its perpetuation was probably due to the association of Dus-gsum-mkhyen-pa with the monastery of Karma gDan-sa, or Lho Karma'i sGar, which he founded in 1147 to the east of the Nom-chu, somewhere between Ri-bo-che and sDe-dge. A few years before his death in 1193 he returned to Central Tibet and in 1189 he founded mTshur-phu in the sTod-lun valley some 50 miles west of Lhasa.

Since the period between May, 1955, and December, 1956, when the Hindus of India lost their system of “personal law”, and the latter was replaced by a new system comprised in the so-called “Hindu Code”, the Sanskrit books which contain the accumulated learning of the dharmaśāstra, or so much of the ancient Indian “science of religious-and-civil law” as survives the ravages of time and the neglect of private owners of manuscripts, have ceased to be the fundamental source of Hindu law, and it is only in marginal contexts that for practical purposes reference to them will ever again be made in that country. Yet the relegation of their ancient learning to practical uselessness may be expected to have a beneficial effect on the study of the dharmaśāstra itself, and that literature, which has been widely neglected in all continents, may once again receive the volume of attention which it could command about eighty years ago. About that time it was still very doubtful what the śāstra had to say on topics of practical importance, and Bühler and Jolly, for example, could be sure that their researches, despite their predilection for the ancient and the “original”, would be of use in the Courts in addition to providing material for academic exercises. By the end of the first decade of this century it was evident that at least as far as British India was concerned the law was about to develop along lines which were to a certain extent incompatible with the śāstra, and the relation of academic study to practical advocacy became intolerably delicate.

The Macartney Embassy failed to bring about a significant improvement in Anglo-Chinese relations; the correspondence of 1795–1796 was equally fruitless. The reasons for this failure lay rather in the nature of the Chinese conception of foreign relations than in any misunderstandings about the British role in the Himalayan crisis of 1788–1792. The Chinese Emperor could have no relations with foreign powers on terms of equality; to the Chinese foreign ambassadors were bearers of tribute, coming to Peking to recognize the supremacy of the Son of Heaven. On such terms no properly accredited embassy from the King of England to the Emperor of China could have had any result other than that achieved by Macartney. Only a mission of the type envisaged by Bogle and Hastings, opportunist and flexible, ready to sacrifice dignity to commercial advantage, stood any chance of success. Tibet and the Himalayas played little part in the failure of the first British Ambassador to China. But the reason why this should be so was not fully understood by the British at that time. The memory of a causal connection between the crisis of the Tibeto-Nepalese War and Lord Macartney's failure remained, and it was to affect subsequent British policy.

The modern city of Ch'üan-Chou, in the Province of Fukien, China, and Situated Near to Amoy on the Formosa Strait, was from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries the chief port for the ocean-going trade between China and the West, particularly during the Sung (A.D. 960–1280) and the Yüan (A.D. 1280–1368) dynasties. An extensive and lucrative trade was carried on with Java, Sumatra, India, and the Persian Gulf. Through Arabic, Persian, and Syriac speaking intermediaries precious products of China found their way on to the European markets. In the thirteenth century the city of Zaitún, as it was known in the West, excited the admiration and wonder of the Polos, the early Franciscan missionaries, and Muslim travellers by the size and wealth of its commercial undertakings. With the fall of the Mongol (Yüan) dynasty about the middle of the fourteenth century the city fell on evil times from which it never fully recovered, for though some considerable trade was carried on during the Ming and Ch'ing dynasties, Ch'üan-chou as an international port declined, and its great rival, Canton, grew from the time that Portuguese traders were allowed to establish themselves at Macao.

The Twelver Shi'a says that the imam Ja'far al-Sadiq disinherited his son Isma'il for drunkenness and gave the succession to another, Musa al-Kazim. Others argued that once an imam always an imam and continued to recognize Isma'il. Prof. Bernard Lewis has pointed out that there are hints at something worse than drunkenness, perhaps heresy. Sunni writers represent the Isma'ilis as godless with seven stages of initiation leading up to a repudiation of all religion but this is due to a misunderstanding and to the belief that every secret doctrine must be evil. Till recently, the Isma'ilis kept their books hidden from the profane and this secrecy still persists but some of their books have now been published though the texts are usually corrupt and need the oral tradition of interpretation to explain them fully.

It has become customary to use the term “samprasāraṇa” in discussing a variety of cases where there is vocalization, or apparent vocalization, of a semivowel in Middle Indo-Aryan. It would seem desirable to examine and classify the circumstances in which the term is used.

In his reply to my Review of the Epigraphia Zeylanica, volume v, part 1, Dr. S. Paranavitana has given further support to my suggestion that the “Panākaḍuva Copper-plate Charter” is a forgery by some close descendant of the supposed recipient of the grant. (See JRAS., 1956, pts. 3, 4, pp. 237–240; 1957, pts. 3, 4, pp. 213–14.)

In two previous articles in this Journal the writer presented lists of the Arabic writings of the two brothers Shehu Usumanu and Waziri Abdullahi dan Fodio from information acquired in Nigeria in 1954 and 1955. The present article, written in Bahrain, is intended to complete these notes by listing the Arabic works of Shehu Usumanu's son, Muhammadu Bello.

When we know that the first 56 per cent of the tenth century OJR has been modelled after the first 65 per cent of BHAṬṬI's mahā-kāvya Rāvaṇavadha, the Bhaṭṭi-kāvya (BhK.), dating from the seventh century, it is possible to compare broadly their contents and form. The most conspicuous literary form in the BhK is that of the yamaka, of which BHAṬṬI, near the middle of his poem, demonstrates twenty different types, that (with the following stanzas on arthâlaṅkāra) interrupt his grammatical exercises. To show how far these examples haye been followed in the OJR, the BhK X.1–22 is printed here (stanza 1 on Anuprāsa, assonance, being included for the sake of continuity of narration). The technical terms added to BHAṬṬI's examples are those given to them by his commentators.