There came into my hands last year a packet of old letters written in the latter end of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth century mostly by members of the Irish family of Purefoy whose home was at Woodfield, near Eyrecourt, in the Co. Galway. Apart from those of purely domestic interest, there are a number written from India by James Purefoy who spent most of his life in the East as a merchant-ship-officer and trader. He went out to India in 1792 and did not return home for twenty-seven years. His extant letters were written either to his sister Mary or to her husband Robert Turbett, a Dublin merchant. Few as they are, they give a realistic if prosaic picture of the ups and downs of a merchant seaman's life during his inevitable long years of exile from his native land.

The not inconsiderable quantity of fine Islamic glass surviving to-day includes very few signed pieces. A list of those bearing the names of their makers has recently been published by Prof. L. A. Mayer, who called for additional information, his researches having produced only eight master-signatures. The last two of these do not concern us here; (i) 'Alī ibn Muḥammad ar-Ramakī (or Zamakī) signed two lamps for a Mamlūk mosque founded in 730/1330, and (ii) Serkhosh Ibrāhīm was responsible for the glass windows in a mosque of Sulaiman the Magnificent (1557). The material reviewed in the present paper is limited to the period ending with the Fatimid dynasty.

Since the period between May, 1955, and December, 1956, when the Hindus of India lost their system of “personal law”, and the latter was replaced by a new system comprised in the so-called “Hindu Code”, the Sanskrit books which contain the accumulated learning of the dharmaśāstra, or so much of the ancient Indian “science of religious-and-civil law” as survives the ravages of time and the neglect of private owners of manuscripts, have ceased to be the fundamental source of Hindu law, and it is only in marginal contexts that for practical purposes reference to them will ever again be made in that country. Yet the relegation of their ancient learning to practical uselessness may be expected to have a beneficial effect on the study of the dharmaśāstra itself, and that literature, which has been widely neglected in all continents, may once again receive the volume of attention which it could command about eighty years ago. About that time it was still very doubtful what the śāstra had to say on topics of practical importance, and Bühler and Jolly, for example, could be sure that their researches, despite their predilection for the ancient and the “original”, would be of use in the Courts in addition to providing material for academic exercises. By the end of the first decade of this century it was evident that at least as far as British India was concerned the law was about to develop along lines which were to a certain extent incompatible with the śāstra, and the relation of academic study to practical advocacy became intolerably delicate.

The Macartney Embassy failed to bring about a significant improvement in Anglo-Chinese relations; the correspondence of 1795–1796 was equally fruitless. The reasons for this failure lay rather in the nature of the Chinese conception of foreign relations than in any misunderstandings about the British role in the Himalayan crisis of 1788–1792. The Chinese Emperor could have no relations with foreign powers on terms of equality; to the Chinese foreign ambassadors were bearers of tribute, coming to Peking to recognize the supremacy of the Son of Heaven. On such terms no properly accredited embassy from the King of England to the Emperor of China could have had any result other than that achieved by Macartney. Only a mission of the type envisaged by Bogle and Hastings, opportunist and flexible, ready to sacrifice dignity to commercial advantage, stood any chance of success. Tibet and the Himalayas played little part in the failure of the first British Ambassador to China. But the reason why this should be so was not fully understood by the British at that time. The memory of a causal connection between the crisis of the Tibeto-Nepalese War and Lord Macartney's failure remained, and it was to affect subsequent British policy.

It has become customary to use the term “samprasāraṇa” in discussing a variety of cases where there is vocalization, or apparent vocalization, of a semivowel in Middle Indo-Aryan. It would seem desirable to examine and classify the circumstances in which the term is used.

In his reply to my Review of the Epigraphia Zeylanica, volume v, part 1, Dr. S. Paranavitana has given further support to my suggestion that the “Panākaḍuva Copper-plate Charter” is a forgery by some close descendant of the supposed recipient of the grant. (See JRAS., 1956, pts. 3, 4, pp. 237–240; 1957, pts. 3, 4, pp. 213–14.)

In two previous articles in this Journal the writer presented lists of the Arabic writings of the two brothers Shehu Usumanu and Waziri Abdullahi dan Fodio from information acquired in Nigeria in 1954 and 1955. The present article, written in Bahrain, is intended to complete these notes by listing the Arabic works of Shehu Usumanu's son, Muhammadu Bello.

When we know that the first 56 per cent of the tenth century OJR has been modelled after the first 65 per cent of BHAṬṬI's mahā-kāvya Rāvaṇavadha, the Bhaṭṭi-kāvya (BhK.), dating from the seventh century, it is possible to compare broadly their contents and form. The most conspicuous literary form in the BhK is that of the yamaka, of which BHAṬṬI, near the middle of his poem, demonstrates twenty different types, that (with the following stanzas on arthâlaṅkāra) interrupt his grammatical exercises. To show how far these examples haye been followed in the OJR, the BhK X.1–22 is printed here (stanza 1 on Anuprāsa, assonance, being included for the sake of continuity of narration). The technical terms added to BHAṬṬI's examples are those given to them by his commentators.