1885.] Dr. R. Mitra — Ancient Hindu Yeterinary Art. 93 



justify tliese conjectures. Anyhow, S'alihotra gave his name to the horse, 

 to veterinary medicine, and to the horse-doctor. The most popular 

 name for the horse-doctor all over Hindustan proper is saluter, and 

 his art is called Saluteri. No authentic work of S'alihotra has 

 come down to the present day ; but the Agni Purdna quotes several 

 chapters, which it attributes to him, and Sir Henry Elliot notices a 

 Persian work, named Kit^rrat ul Mulk, which he found in the Royal 

 Library at Lucknow, and which professed to be a translation from an 

 original named Salutdr, which, it said, was the name of an Indian, a 

 Brahman and the tutor of Susruta. The preface of that work, with 

 characteristic ill-feeling, says that the translation was made in A. H. 783 

 (A. D. 1381) " from the barbarous Hindi into the refined Persian in 

 order that there may be no more need of a reference to the infidels." 

 It was a small work, divided into eleven chapters and thirty sections. 

 Sir Henry refers to another Persian work which was translated from a 

 Sanskrit MS. which one Saiyid Abdulla had plundered from the 

 Library of Amar Sinh, of Chitor, during the reign of Jahangir. The 

 Sanskrit name of the work is said to have been 8alutdri. Neither of 

 these referred to an Arabic translation which was published at Bagdad 

 under the name of Kitah ul Baitarat. The only Hindi work Dr. Mitra 

 has found bears the name of Sldlihotra, and a MS. of it was laid on the 

 table. Judging from its size and character, Dr. Mitra was under the 

 impression that that was the work from which the Persian version of 

 the 14th century had been made ; but as he had not seen the Persian 

 version, he could not speak with any certainty. The name of the Hindi 

 translator was Chetana. 



Soon after S'alihotra come the twin Pandava brothers, Nakula and 

 Sahadeva, who were reputed to be the natural born twins of the Asvins, 

 and devotedly attached to the profession of their parents. The Mahabha- 

 rata does not refer to r^ny work written by them, but Dr. Mitra laid on the 

 table a MS. which professes in its colophon to be the work of Nakula^ the 

 elder of the two brothers. The colophon gives two names to the work. 

 S'alihotra and Asvachikitsita : the words of the colophon are Nahulakrite 

 S'dlihotre Asvacliikitsite. Its language is archaic and enigmatical, and 

 it is limited to 18 sho-rt chapters. It opens with an anecdote of 

 S'alihotra who is apj)ealed to, to describe the qualities of horses fit for 

 the use of Indra. Old as the work doubtless is, there is no positive 

 proof to show that its author was really a Pandava. There is nothing 

 in the text to prevent the assumption that the author was of a much 

 later date and of less dignified pedigree. On a cursory examination 

 Dr. Mitra found the Hindi work to be a very loose rendering of this 

 text. 



