96 Rev. C. Swynnerton — Note on an old Hindu Coin. [July, 



Jabalpur. This dialect can hardly be called Bihari, as it is spoken in a 

 tract of country lying outside of the political boundary of the province 

 of Bihar, nor is it pure Bihari being largely mixed with Western Hindi. 

 The inclusion of this closely allied dialect has, however, the advantage 

 of enabling the authors to explain and illustrate the Ramayan of Tulsi 

 Das, by far the most popular modern work in all Northern India which 

 is written in Baiswari. 



Although the present instalment only carries us as far as the first 

 quarter of the first letter of the alphabet, yet there is sufficient material 

 to enable a judgment to be formed as to the plan and execution of the 

 work, and there is an extremely lucid and valuable introduction in which 

 the authors explain their system of transliteration, their method of 

 dealing with the short a-nd obscure vowels which form so marked a 

 feature in Bihari, as in fact in all unwritten peasant dialects, also their 

 treatment of certain declensional and conjugational peculiarities. They 

 further explain at some length the origin of these dialects from the 

 Mao-adhi Prakrit, the division of words into classes according to their 

 derivation, and many other interesting points relating to the scanty 

 literature of Bihari. 



In the dictionary itself we find a method of treatment far more 

 accurate and scientific than has yet been applied to any Indian language. 

 Each word, even each dialectic form of a word has a separate article 

 devoted to it, in which its various significations are given in their true 

 linguistic order of succession, and illustrated by ample quotations from 

 literature or colloquial phrases, and finally the derivation is carefully 

 traced from the Sanskrit down through the various phrases of Prakrit, 

 with the corresponding forms of the word in the other Aryan languages 

 of India. Nothing so thorough and complete as this has ever been 

 attempted before for any Indian language. The thanks of the Society 

 are due to the authors for this extremely valuable work, and it is to be 

 hoped that they may be enabled to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. 



The Philological Secretaet read the following note on an old 

 Hindu coin by the Rev. Charles Swynnerton, and a letter from General 

 Cunningham on the same subject : 



Size of the coin — precisely as in the figuring. 

 Weight — 33J grains exactly. 



