Vol. X, No. 10.] Bardic and Histl. Survey of Rajputana. 383 



[N.S.] 



an author's personality is more important than any classifica- 

 tion according to contents , form , etc. If these songs are not in a 



sufficient number to make a separate publication, they can find 

 place in the Bulletin, of which I shall speak presently. Anony- 

 mous songs, which cannot possibly be unified nor referred to 

 any author or definite period, should be grouped together 

 according to their contents under the name of the historical 

 personage to whom they refer, and in whose lifetime they have 

 possibly been composed. Many of these songs are real histori- 

 cal documents and the oldest of them form a most valuable 

 supplement to the accounts in the prose-chronicles and should 

 necessarily be taken into consideration in the compilation of the 



History. 



In addition to the special publications above advocated, 

 viz., a Descriptive Catalogue of Bardic and Historical Manu- 

 scripts, and a Series of Bardic and Historical Texts, a publica- 

 tion for matter of a more miscellaneous nature will obviously be 

 required. This is the Bulletin, which has just been mentioned. 

 It should be a quarterly journal containing — besides the 

 necessary information concerning the work and administration 

 of the Survey , like progress reports, annual balance, etc., notices 

 of the most important discoveries, both literary and insc op- 

 tional, brought to light by the search, articles on bardic and 

 historical arguments, editions of small scattered songs that 

 < ould not be published separately, in short all that minute and 

 multiform information which cannot be given except in a 

 periodical and is important enough to be given out as soon as 

 at hand. 



Let us now turn to consider the means by which the 



objects before described can be gained. The chief object of 

 the Survey being that of editing, it goes without saying that 

 most, if not all, of the responsibility of the work will fall on the 

 editor, and it is therefore reasonable that the editor should 

 have the power of controlling all other officers in the Survey, 

 who should work under his supervision, for it would be absurd 

 to make him responsible for the work of people beyond his 

 control. That the search and, in part, also the publishing are 

 subordinate to the editing is plain enough when we think that 

 the ultimate scope of the search is to supply the editor the 

 proper and sufficient materials on which to work, and nobody 

 except him can judge of the value of these materials ; whereas 

 the scope of the publishing is to give his work a permanent 

 form, and nobody better than him can see that the execution 



is correct. 



The editor should, of course, be a European scholar or a 

 native scholar trained in Europe, for he will have to deal with 

 almost virgin languages, whereof grammar and lexicon, as well 

 as origin and connection with the other old and modern Indo- 

 Aryan vernaculars, are only to be ascertained and fixed accord- 



