158 Miscellaneous. 



ceived the intelligence that my friend is to start to-morrow ; you will 

 please to accept the package, and this rambling letter, with the assur- 

 ance that I shall ever recollect with pleasure your short visit to Princ- 

 ton and shall cherish the hope of again meeting with you before the 

 termination of the journey of life." 



4. — Library, fyc. at Jessulmere. 



Extract of a letter from A. Sutherland, Esq. toVL. M. Elliot, Esq. 



"My visit to Jessulmere has been of a very satisfactory kind, as you 

 will see presently. I wish that you or any one learned in Hindu or 

 Buddhist antiquarian lore, were there. You know, I dare say, that the 

 most valuable collection of books in India is believed to be in a Jain 

 temple on the hill fort. The temple has never been desecrated, for the 

 fort was never taken I believe, and the Buddhist form of worship is now 

 the same as it was perhaps a thousand years since ; women principal- 

 ly ministering. There are a number of tablets, some of them in niches 

 in the walls, others separate, covered with inscriptions in unknown cha- 

 racters ; not the arrow-headed, I think. I was disappointed in the 

 extent of the library, which is in a vault of the temple ; the few books 

 we saw, the others being in chests, were, some of them, writings on 

 palm leaves, bound up between boards, such as we see in Ava and 

 China ; the characters readable by the pundits ; but the language un- 

 known ; the only dates readable on the tablets were only 300 or 400 

 years old, but most of them are of great antiquity. Some of the 

 tablets are of a mystical character evidently, and of curious shield 

 shapes. Tod drew much of the material for his history from the 

 Jessulmere library, although he never was there I believe." 



