This painting is a dignified example of Mughal Court art towards the middle of the seventeenth century, when portraiture was at its zenith, and, under Court influence, very much in fashion. Bichitr (a Hindu) was one of several accomplished painters of Shah Jahan's reign. He signs himself here “Servant of the Royal Court”, and his portrait of his master, done in 1632, is at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Several other works by him were included in the celebrated Imperial Album to which “Shah Daulat” belonged. This artist, whose works generally emphasized drawing and eschewed brilliant colour, sometimes painted genre subjects and liked to fill the backgrounds of his portraits with realistic detail. Here, however, he has concentrated on a single figure, and mainly on the face, which is drawn with rare feeling and expressive skill. The Saint, who was a revered Muhammedan religious leader under three Emperors, is an impressive figure, with his white robe and brown scarf set against an almost black background. His enormous hands hold a globe inscribed in Persian, “The Key of the Victory over the two Worlds is entrusted to thy hand”; this may typify the devotion of a not unworldly ecclesiastic to the Emperor.

In Egypt there is a very curious popular instrument. The rattledrum (“Rasseltrommel” in German, “tambour aux boules fouettantes” in French) has been considered up till now to be an instrument of purely Asiatic origin. The works of C. Sachs, A. Schaeffner, and Cl. Marcel-Dubois, illustrate its distribution everywhere in Asia. It is widely spread in India, Mongolia, China, Japan, and Korea. There is also a special variety in Tibet, as mentioned by A. Schaeffner (see plate xv). Yet it has not been pointed out that the instrument also occurs in Africa. In Egypt it must be a relatively recent importation, since it was unknown to the ancient Egyptians.

The introduction by Chaucer into his Knight's Tale of the character of Emetrius, who does not occur in any of the regular source material of the Thebaid story, has never been satisfactorily explained by Chaucerian scholars.

A hlwardt describes in his Berlin catalogue a Ṣūfī tract entitledby him kitāb al-asfār, which he attributes to the wellknown Quṭb al-Dīn al-Jīlī (d. 832/1428). Vollers, who found a second copy of the same work at Leipzig, but there entitled (as it proves, more correctly) al-isfār 'an natā'ij al-asfār, follows Ahlwardt's lead in naming al-Jīlī as the author. These facts have naturally resulted in Brockelmann including the book in the list of al-Jīlī's writings.

The fifteenth-century Persian poet Ashraf has received little attention from the tadhkirah-writers. His name occurs in Aḥmad ‘Alīkhān Hāshimī's vast Makhzan al-gharā'ib, but only with a few baits from a ghazal attached to it, and no details of his life. The only tadhkirah which contains a biographical notice of him is Taqī al-Dīn Kāshī's Khulāṣat al-ash'ār wa zubdat al-afkār. In the India Office manuscript of this work the notice occupies ff. 872 verso—875 verso.

The strife over the succession of the Fatimid Caliph al-Mustanṣir left a decisive mark on the later history of the Ismaili sect. The quarrel between the followers of his two rival sons, al-Musta'lī and Nizār, did not end with the defeat and death of the latter; his adherents, the Nizāris, formed a sect of their own, and the rulers of the Musta'lid branch had no enemies more bitter. The fortunes of the whole Ismaili movement might have taken a very different turn had the redoubtable Assassins made common cause with the Fatimids of Egypt, instead of seizing every opportunity to harm them.

In Sir Aurel Stein's Serindia, E. Hoernle describes a palm-leaf Pothī of sixty-nine folios, marked Ch 0079 a, and found in Tun-Huang. Hoernle saw that this was a manuscript of the large Prajñāpāramitā. A consideration of the numerals led him to the inference that he had to deal with fragments of the Śatasāhasrikā (= Ś). Hoernle did not, however, compare the text of this manuscript with that of other manuscripts of the Prajñāpāramitā. Such a comparison shows that Hoernle's reading of the numerals was, in some instances, not correct, and that Ch 0079 a represents a recension of the Aṣṭādaśasāhasrikā prajñāpāramitā(= Ad).

Hodgson's Sale Catalogue for the 10th July, 1947, of books from Lord Ilchester's Library at Holland House, contained a curious manuscript which was listed as follows under item No. 60.

“Oriental MS.—75 Coloured Drawings of Native Eaces in the Far East, including the Ladrones, Moluccas, Philippines, Java, Siam, China, and elsewhere, those of China depicting Royalty, Warriors, Mandarins, etc., in gorgeous Robes, richly heightened with gold, also 88 smaller Coloured Drawings of Birds and fantastic animals (4 on a page), all within decorative borders, and a double folding Drawing of a Ship, and Natives in small craft, with about 270 pages of MS. text, sm. 4to, calf, lettered, Isla del os Ladrones (eighteenth century).”

According to ancient tradition the malady called with which the Israelites were once threatened and the Philistines were once plagued was “emerods” (E.V.), i.e. “hæmorrhoids” or “piles”, but according to modern scholars “buboes” or “plague-boils” (Hitzig). Which view is correct?

E. W. West (born 1824, died 1905) received the Gold Medal of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1900. In his answer to a letter of congratulations sent to him by a fellow worker in the field of Iranian studies, L. C. Casartelli, later Bishop of Salford, he describes how he became attracted to the study of Zoroastrianism and this curriculum vitae was published in part in a French translation in Casartelli's obituary notice of West (Le Musèon, 1905). West's translations of the main works of later Zoroastrianism make difficult reading for those unacquainted with the language of the original texts, but never fail to elicit admiration on the part of modern scholars who cannot but acknowledge that West, for all his selftraining, possessed an unparalleled grasp of Pahlavi long before the reading of the script acquired some measure of certainty through the discovery of the Manichsean texts from Turfan. Still more valuable than his translations were his numerous notes on Pahlavi MSS., scattered throughout his introductions to his Pahlavi Texts and rather summarily collected in his article in the Grundriss.