1875.] Babu Rajendralal — Beport on Sanskrit MSS. 05 



Bhagavata Purana now in the possession of Babu Harischandra of Benares. 

 It bears date, Samvat, 1367= A. C. 13 10, and is consequently 565 years 

 old. Its paper is of a very good quality, and judging from it, it is to be 

 inferred that the people of the country must have, at the time when it was 

 written, attained considerable proficiency in paper-making. Long before 

 that time, in the reign of Bhoja Raja of Dhara, a work was written on 

 letter-writing (the Prasasti-prqkcis'ikci, and in it detailed directions are 

 given for folding the material of letters, for leaving a large space on the left 

 side of such letters as margin, for cutting a portion of the left lower corner, 

 for decorating the front with gold leaf, for writing the word S'ri a number 

 of times on the back &c, &c, all which apply to paper, and cannot possibly 

 be pi'acticable on palm-leaf, and the inference therefore becomes inevitable 

 that paper was then well-known and in general use, though the word used 

 to indicate it was patra, probably very much in the same way as paper of 

 the present day owes its name to papyrus. Again a verse occurs in the 

 Sanhita of Vyasa, which must be at least two thousand years old, in which 

 it is said " that the first draft of a document should be written on a wooden 

 tablet, or on the ground, and after correction of what is redundant and 

 supplying what is defective, it should be engrossed on patra ," and it would 

 be absurd to suppose that patra here means leaf, for leaves were so cheap 

 that it would have been a folly to save them by writing on wooden tablets 

 which were much more costly. How long before the time of this verse 

 paper was known, I have no positive evidence to show, but the frequent 

 mention in the old Smritis of legal documents (lekhya), of their attestation 

 by witnesses, of their validity, &c, suggests the idea of there having been 

 extant, in olden times, some material more substantial and convenient than 

 palm-leaf for writing, and knowing that paper was first manufactured by 

 the Chinese long before the commencement of the Christian era, that the 

 famous charta bombycina of Europe was imported from the East, and that 

 block-printing was extensively practised in Tibet in the fourth century, I 

 am disposed to believe that the Hindus must have known the art of paper- 

 making from a very early date. Whether they originated it, or got it from 

 the Chinese through the Tibetans, or the Kas'miris, who have been noted 

 for their proficiency in the art of making paper and papier-mache ware, is a 

 question which must await further research for solution. A priori it may 

 be argued that those who manipulated cotton so successfully as to convert 

 it into the finest fabric known to man, would find no difficulty in manufac- 

 turing paper out of it. 



Palm-leaf. — 6. The palm-leaf referred to above is not now much in 

 use, except in Orissa and in the Mufassil vernacular schools as a substitute 

 for slates. In Bengal the Chancli is the only work which is now-a-days 

 written on palm-leaf, as there is a prejudice against formal reading of that 



