The Director of the School of Oriental Studies has invited me to contribute to this first number of the Bulletin a sketch of the history of the foundation of the School. The present article has only the modest ambition of supplying to the future historian of the School certain references, dates, and facts indispensable for his task.

On February 23rd, 1917, the School of Oriental Studies, London Institution, was formally opened by His Majesty King George V. The King was accompanied on this occasion by the Queen and Princess Mary, and the Royal Party included the Countess of Airlie, Lady Mary Trefusis, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, Minister of Education, Lord Hylton, Lord Stamfordham, Colonel the Hon. C. Willoughby, Commander Sir Charles Cust, and Sir Clive Wigram.

The following poems have never been translated before. I have added to my translations only such comments as are indispensable. I hope in a subsequent essay to discuss the importance of pre-T'ang poetry, and to give references to the sources which I have used.

Of these poems all but three are now translated for the first time. Aversions of Nos. 8, 11, and 14 were published by Pfizmaier (Denkschriften der Kais. Akad. d. Wissensch in Wien, vol. xxxvi), but they were so incorrect that I need make no apology for translating these three poems again.

In Bengali, as in most Indian languages, every consonant, unless some other vowel is written with it, i pronounced with an unwritten “inherent” vowel, = a.

The following inscription is now edited—for the first time, as far as I am aware—from an ink-impression which my friend Pandit Shyama Shankar Har Chaudhuri, M.A., of Jhalrapatan, has kindly sent to me, together with a transcription by Pandit Gopal Lal Vyas, Curator of the Archæological Department of H.H. the Maharaja of Jhalawar's Government. The place where it was found is not stated.

The primary business of a teacher is to teach. But everyone who has had practical experience of teaching has found that he has learned from his pupils almost as much as he has taught, since contact with younger minds supplies a new point of view, which imparts a fresh novelty to familiar facts. For example, when a man is acquiring a living language, he learns the pronunciation (not only syllabic pronunciation but the significant tones and inflexions of the language) by sheer imitation, by trusting to his aural memory and his power of grasping sounds unfamiliar to him in his own tongue. But when he tries to impart his accomplishment to others, he must needs analyse, if he is to explain, what he has learnt. Hence teaching, if it is not mere mechanical transmission of information, such as can be got from a book, becomes, in effect, a species of research.

is used here as in Taoist phraseology, to indicate spiritual purity of nature, and cannot very well be translated “true” or “genuine” (), as Diaz takes it, followed by Legge and Saeki. A better definition is that formulated by Diaz himself when he comes to explain the word , namely: . We may observe in passing that the whole of this exordium strongly recalls the language of the Tao Tê Ching, especially in chapters 4 and 25. Nearly all that is said here of the Trinity might apply equally well to Tao. Diaz goes on to remark that is the fundamental attribute () of God, and his fundamental condition (). But perhaps this is over-refinement. Other renderings are appended; the second and third seem to me faulty because they interpret as an adverb modifying .

The Malay language is one of the leading vernaculars of the world, and has been growing in importance of late years owing to the development of trade and particularly of the rubberplanting industry. It is an easy language to acquire a smattering of, as it involves few difficulties of phonetics, accidence, or syntax in the form of it which is current as a lingua franca. But this jargon bears the same relation to the real Malay language as the Pidgin English of the China ports does to our own English. The real Malay is the speech of the Malays themselves. It is a leading member of a vast family of languages, commonly styled the Austronesian, or Malayo-Polynesian, or Oceanic, family, which is of Asiatic origin, but has an almost entirely insular domain. It includes Madagascar, Indonesia, with a part of Formosa, Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia, as well as the greater part of the Malay Peninsula, a portion of the coast of New Guinea, the Mergui Archipelago off the coast of Tenasserim, and a small tract in Eastern Indo-China, which was probably the original centre of dispersion of the whole family. Its extreme, points in Polynesia are (inclusively) the Sandwich Islands, Easter Island, and New Zealand. With the exception of the languages of Northern Halmahera and a few Papuan ones in or near New Guinea, all the numerous native languages of this extensive area are related together and to Malay.

There is not much evidence of regular commerce by sea between India and the Near East previous to about 700 b.c. The Bible (1 Kings x, 11; 2 Chron. ix, 21) speaks of Solomon (c. 1000 b.c.) as importing by sea gold and wood of almuggim or algummim trees from Ophir, likewise peacocks, the Hebrew name for which, tukki, comes from the Tamil tōgai, together with other things that were brought by the fleet of Tarshish. But Ophir cannot be located with certainty in India; almuggim or algummim are an unknown quantity (2 Chron. ii, 8, speaks of algum trees in Lebanon!); so perhaps these statements may be anachronisms. There is better evidence for an overland trade route. On the Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser II (b.c. 860–825) are the figures of an Indian elephant and a rhinoceros brought as tribute to him by an Armenian tribe; and the Rig-veda (VIII, lxxviii, 2) mentions a golden manā, possibly the Assyrian maneh.

Though the development of the mining industiy consequent on European occupation has brought natives of several different tribes into Southern Rhodesia, there appears to be virtually but one indigenous language in this territory. The Zulu spoken by the Matebele and the Sesuto of Sebituane's people, who settled on the Zambezi about the middle of last century, are comparatively recent intrusions.

According to the Arabic proverb “the words of kings are the kings of words”. His Majesty the King in his speech at the opening of the School said, “The ancient literature and the art of India are of unique interest in the history of human endeavour.” He added that we must develop this “intellectual tradition”. One of the finest functions of the School would be to establish, in Lord Curzon's words, “a clearing house for ideas between the East and the West.”

The Lecturer first emphasised the importance of the study of Islam in view of the large number of Muhammadans in the British Empire, amounting (at the lowest estimate) to 90½ millions, and implying a problem of great importance to the statesman, the politician, the educationalist, and to all persons concerned with the larger problems of the globe. Whatever the total Muhammadan population of the world may be, and, in the absence of trustworthy religious statistics, or even of any form of census whatsoever in many of the countries concerned, it is impossible to say exactly what it amounts to,—(on the most careful reckoning, it is probably something between 200 and 230 millions)—the 90½ millions of Muhammadan British subjects form a large proportion of the whole, and have an importance beyond what mere numbers imply, because of the superior culture of large sections among them. He showed by illustrations how religious considerations enter more largely into the daily life of Muhammadan people than in Christian society; the religion of Islam claims to speak with authority in the domain of law, politics, and social organisation, as much as in the sphere of theology and ethics; the wisest and most carefully considered plans of statesmen and reformers run a risk of being wrecked upon the rock of fanaticism. In the world of Islam the foundations of society have been set in religion, in a manner that is hard to understand for the average European Christian who has entered on the inheritance of ancient Greece and Rome, and the institutions of the barbarian invaders who swept the Roman Empire away.