1903.] Annual Address. 19 



same field, and they should not be discouraged. Their collaboration will 

 be of value, and they may find reasons, from time to time, for differing 

 from the official archaeologists. There is always much scope for con- 

 troversy, and our Journals may be enlivened by rival contributions. 

 They are not wanting in evidence that the antiquarian and the philo- 

 logist may often be assigned a place in the genus irritabile to which the 

 poet is proverbially ascribed. I would specially invite officers employed. 

 in land settlements and surveys, as some have, indeed, already done, to 

 notice antiquities, shrines and strange local observances which they 

 may find in the course of their operations. Philology is also receiving' 

 much enlightened help from the Government. The deputation of 

 Dr. Grierson to prepare a Linguistic Survey of India gives promise of 

 great development in philological studies. His labours cannot but attract 

 attention to the numerous languages and dialects of India, and enlist the 

 co-operation of many in the same fruitful field for long years to come. We 

 are already indebted to him, and his former co-ad jutor, Dr. Hoernle, for 

 much advancement in the knowledge of the Bihari vernaculars. An- 

 other important work carried out at the expense of the Government 

 has now been completed, and will, I trust, be soon published — the 

 compilation of a Tibetan-English Dictionary, with Sanskrit Syn- 

 onyms, by Rai Bahadur Sarat Chandra Das, CLE. This work, as dis- 

 tinguished from the Dictionary of Csoma de Koros, which was based on 

 the classical language of Tibet, and that of Jaschke, which has a similar 

 basis and reproduces also largely the language of Western Tibet, claims 

 the merit of dealing specially with the language of the central country 

 and of the modern and current literature, and also of furnishing the 

 Sanskrit equivalent of each Tibetan term — an important contribution 

 towards the exact study of Tibetan literature, which is so largely found- 

 ed on Sanskrit. In the Sanskrit rendering of the Tibetan valuable help 

 has been given by Pandit Satis Chandra Acharjya Bidyabhusan, one 

 of our promising junior members ; and the Rev. Graham Sandberg 

 and the Rev. A. Heyde have also very materially improved the whole 

 work by a thorough revision. Anthropological research has been stim- 

 ulated in the past by the successive Census operations, and will receive 

 fresh stimulus from the recent Census. We have as Secretary in that 

 section Mr. Gait, the officer to whom the Census was entrusted in 

 Bengal, and the Society may look to much valuable work at his hands. 

 We owe to his suggestion the apparently small, but important, innova- 

 tion of publishing short notes in our Journals, which the Council have 

 sanctioned. It is hoped that many persons who are in a position to con- 

 tribute interesting anthropological, philological, and other items of in- 

 formation which, though too small to be published as separate papers, 



