It is well known that the people of Arakan are an offshoot of the Burman race, the accepted account being that they first crossed the range of mountains called the Arakan Yoma about b.c. 825 under a Prince Kanruga-gyi. It seems probable that the small portion of the country then inhabited was settled by a few of the advance-guard of the Chin-Lushai or IsTaga tribesmen, with perhaps some colonies of Indians on the sea-coast. These were expelled or absorbed; and the Arakanese kingdom, having its centre in the flat open plains of the Akyab district, gradually extended south as far as the Mawyon-gyaw Hills, in the Sandoway district, and north to Chittagong (a.d. 1450). It was finally crushed by an invasion of Burmans from the east of the Yoma in 1784. The people of Arakan have, however, preserved their peculiar dialect, and in certain customs they differ slightly from the Burmese, against whom in some of the purely Arakanese parts is still cherished a deep hatred, born from the cruel manner in which they were handled at the Burmese conquest. It must be admitted, indeed, that in their intertribal wars the peoples of the Tibeto-Burman race have endeavoured to enforce in the strictest possible manner the modern doctrine of the “survival of the fittest.” Owing to the steady immigration into Arakan of natives of India, principally from the Province of Bengal, which has been going on for centuries, the physical type of the people has been sensibly altered from the pure Mongoloid cast of their first progenitors.

The doctrine of the Pratītyasamutpāda is expounded at considerable length in the sixteenth chapter of the Caṇḍamahā-roṣaṇa-tantra (MSS. of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Société Asiatique, and Cambridge).

As is well known, the doctrine expressed in this very difficult formula forms one of the details of Buddhist doctrine regarded by the early Buddhists themselves as of primary importance; and its meaning has been frequently discussed. Mr. Waddell lately published in our Journal the explanation of the Lamas of Tibet; and the fullest account of the whole question will be found in Professor Rhys Davids's “American Lectures,” pp. 120, 155–161, where previous discussions are referred to. Since then M. Senart has published a very interesting article on the same subject, which is as rich in the results ascertained as remarkable for the elegance of its deductions.

In a paper entitled ‘On some Ceremonies for Producing Rain,’ which I published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, I gave a short description of the Har Paraurī, or the “Behāri Women's Ceremony for Producing Rain,” to the following effect:—

“The other day I came across another curious custom, peculiar to this part of the country, the observance whereof is supposed to bring down rain. It was at about ten o'clock in the night of Saturday, the 25th June last (1892), as I was about to retire to bed, I heard a great noise made by the singing, in high-pitched tones, of some women in front of our house (at Chupra). I thought that the women were parading the streets, singing songs, as they often do before some marriage takes place in a family. But, on making inquiries next morning, I came to learn that the previous night's singing formed part and parcel of a rainbringing ceremony, known, at least in this district (Saran), as the Har Paraurī, and that some women of the locality had formed themselves into a little band and paraded the neighbouring streets, singing certain songs, which they superstitiously believed would surely bring down showers. Curiously enough, a tolerably good shower of rain fell during the afternoon of the following day.”

More marvellous and more remarkable than the real conquests of Alexander are the stories circulated about him, and the legends which have clustered round his name and his exploits. The history of Alexander has, from a very early period, been embellished with legends and tales. They spread from nation to nation during the whole of the ancient times, and all through the Middle Ages. Many scholars have followed up the course of this dissemination of the fabulous history of Alexander. It would, therefore, be idle repetition of work admirably done by men like Zacher, Wesselofsky, Budge, and others, should I attempt it here. All interested in the legend of Alexander are familiar with those works, where also the fullest bibliographical information is to be found. I am concerned here with what may have appeared to some of these students as the bye-paths of the legend, and which, to my mind, has not received that attention which is due to it, from more than one point of view. Hitherto the histories of Alexander were divided into two categories; the first were those writings which pretended to give a true historical description of his life and adventures, to the exclusion of fabulous matter; the other included all those fabulous histories in which the true elements were smothered under a great mass of legendary matter, the chief representative of this class being the work ascribed to a certain Callisthenes. The study of the legend centred in the study of the vicissitudes to which this work of (Pseudo-) Callisthenes had been exposed, in the course of its dissemination from the East, probably from its native country, Egypt, to the countries of the West.

Having been for years past engaged in researches on the early history of Siātn and its border countries, I had, as a matter of course, to go into their ancient geography— a hitherto unexplored field—and this naturally led me to a study of the documents that the Western geographers of antiquity left us, more especially Ptolemy, who gives us the first collection of anything like authentic data on the countries in question. Thus it came to pass that I found myself hopelessly entangled in the “selva selvaggia, ed aspra e forte” of Ptolemy's geography of India extra-Gangem. I must confess that the results attending my first attempts at interpreting this portion of the work of the great Alexandrian were far from encouraging. This was, however, to be expected, seeing that even master hands like those of Klaproth, Cunningham, Yule, Lassen, and others, whilst meeting with fair success in identifying Ptolemy's names of places west of the meridian of the Ganges, had failed to evolve the slightest order out of the chaos of his trans-Gangetic geography, and to locate with certainty even a single one of the numerous cities he names beyond the outskirts of the Gulf of Bengal.

Since the commencement of Cuneiform studies in Europe attentionhas been paid to Armenian or Yannic inscriptions; and, as is well known, it was the unfortunate Schulz who first copied and collected the inscriptions of Yan. These copies, full of faults, were those on which scholars commenced their Yannic studies. After Mordtmann, Robert, and F. Lenormant, Professor Sayce deciphered and published, as far as possible, bis own and his predecessor's researches.

In the introduction to his edition and translation of the Madhura Sutta (J.R.A.S. 1894, p. 341 ff.) Mr. R. Chalmers calls attention to the Gāthā concerning the pre-eminence of the Kṣatriyas, which the Buddha quotes at the end of the Ambaṭṭha Sutta and elsewhere with great approval, and attributes to the Bramhā Sanaṃkumāra, the Sanatkumāra of the Brahmanical literature, who is described both as a teacher of the Yogaśāstra and as one of the mind-born sons of Brahmā, or as identical with Skanda. Mr. Chalmers thinks that the verse can hardly be a concoction of the Buddhists, as the exposure of such a forgery would have been inevitable. On the other hand, he believes that with the growing pretensions of the Brahmans such an utterance might have easily dropped out of the official recensions of the Brahmanical texts. But he expresses the hope that the verse may be discovered in Sanskrit, to the credit both of the Buddha and of the Brahmans.

The large number of documents of a private nature found in Assyria and Babylonia makes it a fairly easy task to find out something about the every-day life of the people of those interesting districts, not only during later times, when the kings of the “later empire” ruled, butalso daring the period of the dynasty to which Ḫammurabi (identified with Amraphel) belonged (2300 B.C. and the three succeeding centuries). As the recently published second part of Cuneiform Texts from Babylonian Tablets contains some very good inscriptions of this period, I have translated a fewwhich will probably prove to be not uninteresting for such as study the manners, customs, laws, etc., of the ancient Semites.

Although the Indian and English newspapers have already published slight notices of the recent discovery of Kapilavastu and the Lumbini Garden, and the new Aśoka inscriptions will in due course be edited in the official publications of the Archaeological Survey, I think that the Society will be glad to see the actual words of the Lumbini Garden inscription, and some notes, based on local knowledge, concerning the most important archaeological discovery which has been made in India for many years.