February, 1911.) Vice-President’s Address. xii 
India. Since the time of the foundation of our Society, it has 
been our proud privilege to claim as our patron the head of the 
administration in this country, and it is not a mater for sur- 
prise that our efforts to extend the bounds of knowledge should 
receive adequate encouragement from the State. The cost of 
the erection of a new building has not yet been worked out in 
full detail, and it is not improbable that we may hereafter be 
driven to ask the Government of India to supplement what it 
has already so generously given, and we venture to express the 
hope that, should such a contingency arise, our application 
will meet with sympathetic consideration by the Government of 
His Excellency, to whom we are all grateful for the encourage- 
ment he has given us by his gracious presence this evening. 
et us now turn for a moment to an examination of the 
work of the Society during the last twelve months. The feature 
of that work which at once arrests the attention is the develop. 
ment of what may be compendiously described as Tibetan 
studies. On a previous occasion, | ventured to lay stress upon 
the importance of the study of Tibetan sources for tlie dis- 
covery of unexplored materials which might illuminate many a 
dark corner in Indian history and antiquities. It is now well 
known that the secluded monks of Tibet carried away from 
India during, what may be called the dark ages of Indian his- 
tory, valuable works in different departments of Sanskrit learn- 
ing which have been preserved in Tibet, sometimes in original, 
sometimes in translation, though the originals have been com- 
pletely lost in the country of their birth. The recovery of lost 
Sanskrit works from Tibetan sources—and similar observations, 
I may add, apply to Chinese sources—is a matter of consider- 
able interest and importance. I confess, therefore, that every 
effort made for the promotion of Tibetan studies amengst our 
scholars, every facility given in this direction, appeals to my 
sympathy and imagination. We opened the last year with an 
During the last year also, we have made satisfactory arrange- 
ments for the re-publication in a collected form of the papers of 
Csoma de Koros, and actually brought out the first part of his 
trilingual vocabulary which has remained unpublished in our 
possession for more than three quarters of a century. This 
and philosophical terms, compiled by Indian Sanskritists, trans- 
lated into Tibetan by learned nas 
endered into English in the beginning of the last century by 
