112 Badaon'i and his Works. [No. 3, 



all expenses of collection or collation of the MSS. herein referred to. 

 I have no idea whether any grant for purposes of publication was 

 subsequently made by the Government of India.'* 



The year before Mr. Hammond had been commissioned to collect 

 the Agra Library MSS., Mr. Morley's Catalogue of the Historical 

 MSS. of the R. A. S. made its appearance. In the absence of the 

 completing portion of Sir H. M. Elliot's Index, the publication of 

 this catalogue was of the greatest importance, whilst it is still one of 

 the best indexes to the Historical works of other Muhammadan 

 countries. 



The loss of 67 MSS. of 35 historical works is irreparable. Any one 

 who has been collecting MSS. in India, knows how difficult it is to 

 obtain any at all. The paucity of MSS. at the present day, is due to 

 vermin, the climate, the impoverished status of many Muhammadan 

 families, but especially to the introduction of printing and litho- 

 graphing, which has made kdtibs superfluous. The number of pro- 

 fessional copyists is very small, and daily decreasing. Bearing 

 moreover in mind that historical works, as also dictionaries, are from 

 their voluminousness more rarely copied than Diwans and other light 

 reading, we should not have been surprised, if the loss of the Agra 

 MSS. had frustrated the last hope of carrying out Sir H. M. Elliot's 

 scheme of issuing, in India, editions of Native Historians. 



It was therefore fortunate, as it was patriotic, that the Philologi- 

 cal Committee of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in 1859, took 

 up the scheme, and resolved to print in the New Series several works 

 on the History of Muhammadan India. The minute book of the 

 Philological Committee shews that it was Mr. A. Grote, its President, 

 who first advocated the editing of Muhammadan Historians. He says 

 in his minute of the 26th September, 1859 : — 



" I am strongly in favour of publishing the works of some of the 

 11 Persian Historians of Muhammadan India. The N. W. Govern - 

 " menthad, it will be remembered, a project for bringing out a series of 

 " such histories. This, Mr. Muir tells me, has, for the present, been 

 " abandoned, all the materials collected for the publication having 

 " been destroyed at Agra in 1857. The only MSS. which escaped, 

 " were those of Zia i Barani, which Mr. Hammond had taken home 

 * Vide Journal, R. A. S. 1868, p. 475. 



