48 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [Jan. 



not the work of Professor Wilson I have no hesitation in saying. It 

 is true that the late Professor alludes, in his " Essays on the Puranas," 

 (Journal Royal Asiatic Society V. p. 64), and also in his Introduction to 

 Professor Johnson's " Selections from the Mahabharata," to an abstract 

 of the great epic prepared under his superintendence, but this is not that 

 work. It was in 1822 that the Government sanctioned an establish- 

 ment of two pandits and 3 or 4 native assistants — young men brought 

 up in the then recently established Hindu College — who, under the 

 superintendence of Dr. Wilson, prepared abstracts of nearly all the 

 Puranas, of some of the Upa Puranas, and of the Mahabharata. 

 Among the assistants who were engaged in this work, I may name 

 Babu Kas'iprasadaGhosa, Babu Tarachand Chakravarti, Babu Chandra- 

 s'ekhara Deva and Babu Hedambanatha Thakura. The establishment 

 was broken up in 1829. Copies of the works produced by these assistants, 

 except the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, exist in the Society's 

 Library, but their style is so very different that, had the evidence of the 

 dates been wanting, that would have of itself sufficed to shew that the 

 MS. under notice is not one of them. It may be said that Wilson had 

 prepared the translation himself long before the translation establishment 

 was sanctioned or thought of. But such a position is not at all tenable. 

 In the first place, Wilson nowhere says anything of his having ever 

 prepared such a version, which he would, for certain, have done in his 

 "Essays" and the Introduction above alluded to, if he had done so. 

 Secondly, Wilson had acquired a thorough knowledge of the Sanskrit 

 language in 1812, when he rendered into English verse the charming 

 poem of the Meghaduta or "the Cloud Messenger," and it is impossible to 

 suppose that he would have taken a Persian version of the Mahabharata 

 for his labours when he had the Sanskrit original open before him — the 

 more so as he was a far better scholar in Sanskrit than in Persian. 

 And thirdly, the style in which Wilson wrote, is so different from the 

 writing of the MS. that that of itself is enough to settle the question. 

 There are in the archives of the Society, a number of draft letters, 

 minutes, and circulars, written by Wilson from 1816 to 1832, during the 

 time he was Secretary to the Society, and these I have carefully exa- 

 mined, and they appear to me as unlike the writing of the MS. as they 

 well could be. I have also examined the hand-writings of Colebrooke, 

 Wilford and Mr. W. Blacquire, who was for a long time Government 



