The ancient Sanskṛit literature of India is attracting daily the increasing attention of Orientalists of Europe. Sanskṛit works, hitherto unknown, are being brought to the notice of the public by the labours of European scholars like Doctors Bühler, Cowell, Burnell, and others. Those labours, however, have been but very imperfectly extended to the purely Sanskṛit literature of Keraḷam or Malayâḷam in the South-Western extremity of India. In the blessed isolation which that Land of Paraśu-râma had for ages enjoyed, the cultivation of Sanskrit literature was far from being neglected. Poets have flourished who would yield superiority to none in the rest of India, except perhaps to the great Kâlidâsa and one or two others of the highest rank. It cannot, therefore, be labour wasted to bring some of the works left by them to the notice of European Orientalists. The manuscript here printed for the first time is a poem called “Śuka-sandeśa,” or “Śuka-dûta”— “Parrot-messenger.” It is very much on the plan of Kâlidâsa's celebrated “Megha-dûta,” so admirably translated into English verse by the late Professor Horace Hayman Wilson. The metre is the same—Mandâkrântâ.

The She King, usually translated the Book of the Odes, or the Classic of Poetry, is not so well known to the outside world as it deserves to be. It is one of the Classics or Canons of Chinese learning, and, like its companion books, is supposed not only to contain deep lessons of morality for the instruction of future ages, but to have been compiled, if not written, for the express purpose of their inculcation. The events recorded or alluded to in it are said to have taken place between 1765 and 585 B.C. Confucius himself is acknowledged to have been the compiler. Ssŭ Ma ch'ien states: ”The old poems amounted to more than 8000. Confucius removed those which were only repetitions of others, and selected those which would be serviceable for the inculcation of propriety and righteousness.” In other words he brought out a revised and expurgated edition. Constant allusions to the Odes are found in the Confucian Analects, the Master on all occasions expressing the highest admiration for the work, and enjoining on his disciples the necessity of a thorough study of it.

Le terme maître, seigneur, entre fréquemment comme second membre dans les composés sanscrits. Il n'est pas toujours aisé de se rendre compte de la manière dont les deux parties du mot se sont soudées l'une à l'autre. Plusieurs cas présentent des difficultés qui ont mis la sagacité des grammairiens à la torture.

“The dry old stick,” as we heard at our last meeting, here affectionately designated that great Orientalist, Horace Hayman Wilson, knew Alexander Csoma de Körös well, and was in frequent correspondence with this Tibetan scholar, when the latter was pursuing his studies at the Buddhist monasteries in Zanskar, particularly at Pukhtar, and afterwards at Kanum in Upper Besarh.

Cinquième partie du Livre contenant les vertus des aliments et des remèdes par le cheikh éminent Diâ ed-dîn ‘Abd Allah ebn Ahmad ebn Mohammad, le botaniste, de Malaga, connu sous le nom d'Ebn el baytar.