In the year 1837, Dr. A. Burn transmitted to Mr. James Prinsep, then Secretary of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, transcripts and facsimiles of four Copper Plate Inscriptions. “These plates,” he said, “were found in the town of Kaira, about ten years ago. The river Watrua runs close to the walls on the north-west side, and was the cause of the discovery, by washing down the walls and earth. They had been handed about the country among the natives for translation, it being supposed they were connected with some deposit of treasure. At last they were brought to me by a fakir, of whom I purchased them.”

It is only in the ninth and tenth books of the Rig Veda that there is any very distinct and prominent reference made to a future life. It is true that the Ṛbhus, on account of their artistic skill, are said to have been promised, and to have attained, immortality and divine honours (i. 161, 2; iv. 35, 3, 7, 8); but this is a special case of deification, and does not prove that ordinary mortals were considered to survive after the termination of their earthly existence. There are, however, a few other passages which may be understood as intimating a belief in a future state of blessedness. Thus (i. 91, 1) it is said, that “by the guidance of Soma the sage ancestors of the worshippers had obtained treasures among the gods;” and again, in v. 18, “Soma, becoming abundant to (produce) immortality, place for us excellent food in the sky.”

Colebrooke, in his celebrated essay “On the Vedas, or Sacred Writings of the Hindus” (As. Researches, vol. viii.; Misc. Essays, vol. i.), was the first to direct general attention to the now familiarly known passage of the Jyotisha relative to the position of the solstices in the Hindu lunar zodiac, and to derive from it a date for use in determining the doubtful chronology of the earliest period of literary productiveness in India. His conclusion is expressed as follows: “Hence it is clear, that Dhanishṣhâ and Aslesha are the constellations meant; and that, when this Hindu calendar was regulated, the solstitial points were reckoned to be at the beginning of the one, and in the middle of the other: and such was the situation of those cardinal points in the fourteenth century before the Christian era” (Misc. Essays, vol. i., pp. 109–110). He had a little before (ibid., p. 106) declared that he “inclined to think, that the ceremonies called yajña, and the prayers to be recited at those ceremonies [namely, the prayers constituting the sanhitâs of the three older Vedas], are as old as the calendar.”

Having been led from the interest which has attached to Mr. Colebrooke's opinion, on the subjects discussed in Professor Whitney's paper, to examine the very copious memoranda on Hindu astronomy, which are in my possession, I think I am in a position to clear up some of the points which have given rise to this controversy. It seemed to be so improbable that Mr. Colebrooke should have taken such pains to identify the constellations named in the passage of the Jyotish, and have so pointedly referred to the double observation of the solstices as determining the epoch of the observation, while he was really grounding his opinion on the position of another asterism, that I thought the subject merited a closer scrutiny.

In a passage which I have already quoted in my former paper on the Vedic mythology (p. 59) Yâska, the author of the Nirukta, informs us (vii. 5) that previous writers of the school to which he himself belonged (the Nairuktas) reduced the deities mentioned in the Vedas to three—viz., “Agni, whose place is on the earth, Vâyu or Indra, whose place is in the air, and Sûrya, whose place is in the sky;” and asserted that “these deities had severally received many appellations in consequence of their greatness, or of the diversity of their functions, as the names of hotr, adhvaryu, brahman, and udgâtr, are applied to one and the same person [according to the particular sacrificial office which he happens to be fulfilling].” In the preceding section (vii. 4) Yâska goes still further and declares that “owing to the greatness of the deity, the one Soul is celebrated as if it were many. The different gods are separate members of the one Soul.”

The name of this celebrated astronomer is written either Âryabhaṭa or Âryabhaṭṭa, but generally with one ṭ only. In an old manuscript of the Brahma Sphuṭa Siddhânta of Brahmagupta, copied in Samvat 1678, or A.D. 1621, the name occurs about thirty-three times, and is invariably written Âryabhata; and a double ṭ cannot be introduced without violating the Âryâ metre.

I. The Malagasy belongs unquestionably to the stock of languages which have been denominated Malayo-Polynesian, and more particularly to the great Western Branch, which comprehends the languages of the lank-haired races of the Indian Archipelago and the Philippines, and which we shall call Malayan (from the most predominating language in that part of the globe), to distinguish it from the Eastern Branch, which may be called Maorian (from the Maori of New Zealand), the geographical term Polynesian haying the disadvantage of not excluding the languages of the crisp-haired races. The Malagasy bears the greatest analogy to the Toba dialect of the Batak in pronunciation (III), and many salient points in its grammatical structure may be pointed out (IV) to prove its affinity to Javanese, Batak, Malay, Dayak, and other Malayan tongues.

At the meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society, on the 21st Nov., 1864, I undertook the task of establishing the identity of the Xandrames of Diodorus Siculus and Quintus Curtius, the undesignated king of the Gangetic provinces of other Classic Authors—with the potentate whose name appears on a very extensive series of local mintages under the bilingual Bactrian and Indo-Pali form of Kraṇanda.