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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XIII. 



thousand Louis. By that term was not meant a thousand members of 

 the royal family, :but coins that bore the name of Louis. Possibly 

 "goldsmith" in the present case meant a gold piece, and he could 

 not but hope there was some mistake either in the reading or the 

 translation. 



With regard to the date of the poem, he believed the reader of the 

 Paper was prepared to find that what he had advanced was a new 

 view — at any rate to those who had access only to European scholars. 

 He (the speaker) had referred to considerable authorities upon the 

 point, and he had read Dr. Caldwell's " Grammar " and Sir William 

 Hunter's " Gazetteer " on the subject. It was right that the Members 

 of the Royal Asiatic Society should be informed that with regard to 

 that great era and landmark, as it undoubtedly was, the publication 

 of the Tamil Rdmdy ana— there was very great doubt about it, and 

 Dr. Caldwell brought it down to the year 1100. He was not 

 satisfied, from the quotations made by the author of the Paper, that 

 the Tamil translation of the Rdmdyana was made in the ninth 

 century, or that the Tamil translation of Sakdnda-purdna was made 

 in the eighth century. There was nothing to show that those 

 prefatory verses were written by the authors themselves. From 

 what he had read of Dr. Caldwell it seemed to him that Kamban, 

 the famous Tamil poet, had lived in the reign of Vira Rajendra Chola, 

 in the eleventh century. 



Mr. Senathi Raja said that the interest of the Paper consisted, as 

 His Lordship very properly remarked, in its throwing some light on 

 the history of Tamil literature. The difficulty which Oriental scholars 

 hitherto experienced in regard to Indian literature in general, whether 

 Sanskrit or Tamil, was the fixing of the exact dates and period when 

 different authors lived. That difficulty was to some extent removed, 

 in the case of Sanskrit authors, by the labours of foreign scholars. 

 But in regard to Tamil literature there were very few foreign scholars 

 who laboured in that field, and among them the only noteworthy and 

 reliable men who attempted to give any chronology in regard to Tamil 

 literature were Drs. Caldwell and Burnell. 



Dr. Caldwell was, no doubt, an eminent philologist, and he has done 

 immense service to Oriental scholarship by his great work, " The 

 Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian Languages," but with regard 

 to the chronology which he gave of Tamil literature he had no 

 very reliable materials before him. He arbitrarily assigned the 

 beginning of Tamil literature to the eighth century of our era, his 

 reason being ithat most of the early Tamil works were composed by 

 Jain authors. 



Dr. Caldwell thought, moreover, that Jainism had its origin in 

 Northern India about the beginning of the fifth century, and that it 

 spread to Southern India only about the eighth. He did not know 

 what authority Dr. Caldwell had for his statement that Jainism 



