1899.] Annual Achlress. 21 



ronyms which ordinainly have something to do with the reguhition of 

 inter-marriage. If this is so a parallel is to be found in the case of 

 the Telingas, a small caste discovered in Bankura ten years ago. 

 These people claimed and were believed to be the descendants of 

 certain sepoys imported from Madras in the last century by one of the 

 Rajas of Bishenpur. They married only among themselves, but had 

 adopted, for the purpose of determining the prohibited degrees in 

 wedlock, the totemistic section-names of the semi-aboriginal Bagdis 

 and Bauris of Western Bengal. I can only hope that some local student 

 of folk-lore will be moved to approach the Siyalgiris with the set of 

 questions we circulated recently and will send us the results. 



Mr. Grierson also contributed some interesting Notes on the date of 

 the composition, of Ttchl Ddss Ramaynna, which seek to establish the 

 fact that the famous poet died in Benares of the plague, which in 

 Jehangir's time ravaged India for eight years (16I6-162I!) and that he 

 spent the last four days of his life in dictating the Hanuman-baliuka, 

 an appendix to the Kavitta-Ramayana, which describes the symptoms 

 of his disease. The theory imputes to the poet astonishing vitality, 

 but his description of what the faculty call an axillar bubo has cer- 

 tainly been distressingly familiar to all students of modern plague 

 literature during the last two years. 



Babu M. M. Chakravartti's paper on Modern Orbja Poets carries us 

 still further to the East tlian Benares, the home of Tfdsi Das. The 

 learned gentleman has embodied in it a large amount of new informa- 

 tion on the modern History of Orissa and its vernacular literature 

 which may be said to owe its origin to the great religious movement 

 which is connecfed with the worsliip of Krsna. 



While the papers just referred to deal with the vernacular lan- 

 guages of India, tlie greater part of the Philological work done by 

 the Society concerns the classical languages of this country, viz., Sanskrit 

 Arabic and Persian. It would be beyond the scope of this brief review 

 to mention all the names and titles of the various works published by 

 the Society in the Bihliotheca Indica during the last year. Speaking 

 generally, it may be said that the last year's outturn of fasciculi in this 

 series has been below the average of former years. This deficiency 

 appears to be partly due to the plague-scare which drove away from 

 Calcutta many of our native editors and thus interfered with the 

 steady pursuit of their literary work, and partly to the fact that a good 

 many new works have been taken up, which have not yet advanced far 

 enough for publication. Among those new works, it will be welcome 

 news to all scholars who are interested in Vedic Literature to know 

 that an edition of the Cataixitha-Bii^hviatia has been entrusted to Pandit 



