In his paper L'Arrivée des Portugais en Chine, published in T'oung Pao in 1912, M. Cordier, before giving a more detailed account of the events in the Further East following on the taking of Malacca in 1511, gave a lucid sketch of the events accompanying the first establishment of Portuguese power in Eastern seas. I consider that these events require to be further set forth, for as far as I am aware the existing histories do not give any adequate and consecutive account of the struggle for the mastery of the Arabian Sea carried out by the Portuguese against the Muḥammadan states, and more especially against the Turks, who in the sixteenth century were the most powerful military state in the world. In this paper I propose to deal with this subject to the best of my ability.

It is a genuine pleasure to report the accession of another Chinese critic and investigator of the Shang dynasty writing, in the person of Mr. Wang Kuo-wei of Hai-ning Chou , in the Central Chinese Province of Chehkiang.

I propose to lay before the readers of the Journal one or two of the more interesting results of his decipherments, together with a few notes of my own upon these.

The name of the important Seleucid city which occupied the site of the ancient Carchemish is still uncertain. German scholars have identified it with the Oropus or Europus of classical geography, but as is pointed out by Commander Hogarth, who has discussed the question very fully in Carchemish, pt. i, pp. 19 sqq. (1914), if Oropus is identified with the town placed by the Peutinger Table between Birejik and the Sajur, and this again is identified with Carchemish, the mileage attached to it will not agree with the actual facts. There is the further difficulty that, although one of the modern names given to the site is Jerabîs, which could be derived from Oropus, or rather its later Greek deformation Europus, the more usual and probably older name is Jerablûs, which is Hierapolis.

The Anthology is a manuscript furnished by Dr. Sa'iīd, of Sina, to the British Museum, numbered Or. 6444; the writer is working from a photographic reproduction made for him in 1908 by order of Mr. A. G. Ellis.

The distance from the Oriental Department of the British Museum and absence of sufficient books of reference—this article is being written in Sulaimania, South Kurdistan—is a handicap on adequate comparison of words.

In July, 1914, the Journal printed the Latin text, with English translation, of various documents relating to the Minor or Franciscan Friars in China. Of these the most important were three letters written from China and other extracts from a fourteenth century chronicle, which is preserved in the Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris (MS. Latin 5006). On p. 555 of the article referred to I wrote: “Monsieur H. Cordier tells me that he knows of no other copy of the Chronicles, but at the same time is inclined to doubt that the Paris MS. (Latin 5006) is the copy used by Wadding.” Wadding, readers may be glad to be reminded, was the author of a great work called Annales Minorum, in which the three letters from China were printed for the first time, and, indeed, for the only time until 1914 from a manuscript. All the other Latin texts with which I am acquainted and all the versions are obviously based on Wadding's text. In spite of M. Cordier's opinion I continued to think that it was at least possible that Wadding had copied rather carelessly the MS. which is now at Paris.

The following errata are to be made in the article “On the Representation of Tones in Oriental Languages” appearing in the Journal for October, 1920:—p. 455, footnote, 1. 2, for “Anthropus” read “Anthropos”. p. 465, wherever the word “Quocangu” occurs, correct it to “Quocangu”.