Brian Houghton Hodgson lived and worked at the BritishResidency in Kathmandu from1820 to 1843, and servedas British Resident in Nepal for the last ten ofthese years.1 Hedied in 1894, and some 25 yearsafter his death Perceval Landon wrote:

Some time ago my attention was arrested by the remarkof Mr. Cecil Bendall who, writing in 1886, whileHodgson was still alive, referred to him as ‘thegreatest, and least thanked of all our EnglishResidents’. It is difficult to dispute eitheradjective. Hodgson was indeed more than the greatestofEnglish Residents. He was the founder of all ourreal knowledge of Buddhism. He was the only manwhoseinfinite variety of scholarship and interest could,unaided, have written the true history of Nepal.

In Ethiopia the last decades of the nineteenth centuryand the first of the twentieth were of crucialimportance. This period witnessed the rise of King,after 1889 Emperor, Menilek, founder of the modernEthiopian state. He it was who established thepresentcapital, Addis Ababa, in 1886–7, defeated anItalian colonial army at the battle of Adwain 1896,and between 1905 and 1910 established a number ofmodern institutions, including the first modernbank, school, hospital, roads and railway. A notableinnovator, he was well content to utilise the skillsof Indians, as well as other foreigners, forthemodernisation of his age-old empire.

In Mandaeism, to copy a manuscript is a meritorious act— a Mandaean copyist (usually a priest) mayundertake the task as an exercise to remit his ownsins, and those of his family — or he may be hiredto perform the task for someone else. Almost allMandaean manuscripts contain colophons; excluded aretalismans and other short magical texts. In the casewhere the transmission of a Mandaean text spans,say, fifteen or sixteen centuries, a colophon may bevery long. Copying the MandaeanGinza is a major piece of work,for it is the most voluminous of all known Mandaeantexts. Mark Lidzbarski's Ginza edition andtranslation did not include the colophons, the listsof scribes that are attached to the text.

Few Islamic teachings can boast the fame, if not thenotoriety, enjoyed by the doctrine of “unity ofexistence”, also known as “unity of being”(waḥdat al-wujūd). Thiscontroversialphilosophical doctrine becameintimately associated with the towering figure ofthe Arabmystic of al-Andalus, Muḥyī'l-Dīn Ibn 'Arabī(d. 638/1240). Although Ibn 'Arabī himselfdoes notseem to have applied this ambiguous term to hisloosely structured meta physical speculations, itgained wide currency among his followers startingfrom the celebrated Anatolian thinker Ṣadr al-Dīhal-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274).

The Western science and technology which invaded Chinaduring the mid-nineteenthcentury, in the wake ofEuropean military and economic aggression, entered aculture witha long indigenous tradition of naturalphilosophy, formed by extraordinary figures suchasZhang Heng (78–139),Sun Simiao (581–682),Ge Hong (c. 21–341),Shen Gua (1031–1095)and Song Yingxing (c.1587–1665). Moreover, as modern research has shown,China was, at least until about A.D. 1400,moreadvanced scientifically and technologically thanWestern Europe in many respects. Thesmall minorityof late Qing scholars who showed any interest in thenatural world or intechnology could consolethemselves that they were working within a noble butneglected side-stream of Chinese culture.

The Royal Asiatic Society has recently been abeneficiary from the estate of Mrs Dorothy Wales,widow of H. G. Quaritch Wales, the erudite scholarof early Southeast Asian history who died in 1981.The occasion of this bequest, the contents of whichare discussed in the Librarian's report herein (pp.169–70), prompts this note on the contribution ofQuaritch Wales to Southeast Asian studies.

Quaritch Wales was born in 1900 and educated atCharterhouse and Queens' College, Cambridge. Heimmediately embarked on a career in Southeast Asia,from which he was never to be deflected. At the ageof 23 he entered the service of the SiameseGovernment where he served from 1924 to 1928 as anadviser to the courts of King Rama VI and King RamaVII. The first-hand knowledge gained from thisexperience formed the basis of his pioneering studySiamese State Ceremonies (1931), which remains awork of unrivalled insight into the Brahmanicalrituals and Buddhist accretions of Thai kingship. Hefollowed this with another work based on hisexperiences of Thai court and state functions,Ancient Siamese Government and Administration(1934).