1887.] Address. 57 



Dhruva continues his notices of Sanskrit grants and inscriptions of Gujrat 

 kings ; H. Jacobi devotes a paper to our knowledge of Aryd ; and there is 

 another by Dr. E. Hultzsch on inscriptions from Amaravati. In tho 

 same Journal is a valuable contribution from P. von Bradke on Asura and 

 Manet, in which he endeavours to show the true signification of those terms. 

 In the Nachrichten von der Kbniglichen GeselUchaft der Wissenschaften, Dr. 

 Hultzsch has a paper on Mataraja's drama Tdpasavatsardja, in which this 

 work is ascribed to the second half of the ninth century, and the author is 

 shown to be indebted to Buddhist sources for much of his plot. 



In L'epigraphie et Vhistoire linguistique de VInde by another of our 

 centenary members, M. Senart, that distinguished scholar treats of the 

 linguistic history of India from the stand-point of epigraphy and arrives 

 at several novel conclusions, deserving of great consideration. From the 

 inscriptions of Piyadasi, it is evident that the Vaidik and religious lan- 

 guages attained to considerable culture at about the beginning of the 

 third century before Christ. As regards classical Sanskrit, its elaboration 

 should be placed between the same date and the first century A. D. and 

 its general use in literary and official documents at the end of the first 

 or beginning of the second century A. D. With reference to the mixed 

 Sanskrit, called the dialect of the gdthds, it is only a form of writing 

 Prakrit, which was popularised, especially by the Buddhist Raja Ka- 

 nishka, and became a literary dialect in certain schools of Buddhism. 

 As regards the Prakrits, the earlier establishment of Sanskrit deter- 

 mines their grammatical form, which was fixed in the third or fourth 

 century, so that none of the works in these dialects can be con- 

 sidered as existing in their present form before that time. In the 

 Journal of the American Oriental Society, we have papers on Vaidik 

 subjects by Mr. M. Bloomfield ; on the Dravidians by T. S. Chand- 

 ler ; on negative clauses in the Rig-veda by Miss E. Channing ; Hindu 

 Eschatology and the Katha Upanishad by Professor Whitney, whose 

 severe criticisms of Professor Max Miiller's work must be known 

 to you all ; and on the warrior caste in India and lexicographical notes 

 on the Mahabharata by E. W. Hopkins, who also undertook the comple- 

 tion of Manu's Institutes on the death of Dr. A. C. Burnell. I would 

 indicate the Athenaeum, and Academy, amongst English papers, and 

 the Oriental Journal to be published in Vienna, as a continuation of the 

 Oesterreichische Monatsschrift fur den Orient and the German Literary 

 Gazette {Deutsche Litter aturzeitung) founded by Dr. Max Rodiger in 

 Berlin, amongst foreign papers, other than the Journals of Societies, in 

 which those engaged in Oriental studies will always find matters of in- 

 terest, especially in the short notices of what has been done, or is being 

 done, and has not yet been published. 



