found forty miles from Batavia, are exceedingly meagre, and appear to be the work of a primitive epoch. Those of Majapahit, close by Soerabaia, are numerous and magnificent. But the chronicles which make these kingdoms the subject of their narratives were not composed until the Mohammedan period was well advanced; or, at least, if they had a previous existence, they were then remodelled under the direction of the susunans, or emperors. They have, therefore, to be regarded with considerable suspicion. In the case of the chronicles which relate contemporary events, we are on surer ground. But such is the nature of the Javanese, and such the literary character of the babad, that even here we are by no means certain to meet with actual facts. The babad is a poem composed in a common Javanese measure, which purports to give an account of historical persons and events. Sometimes it relates the fortunes of empires; sometimes it degenerates into a mere genealogical tree. Every Javan "prince" has his "babad," in which the names of his ancestors and their deeds are recounted. Remembering the fertility of the Eastern imagination, and the despotic character of Eastern rulers, it is easy to understand that such babads were more often than not reduced in point of veracity to the standard of an average fairy tale. M. Brumund, whose remarks on this subject are embodied in Leemans' work on the Boro-Boedoer temple, deals very severely with the babads. He cannot away with them, and goes near to denying their claims for credence altogether. But surely a distinction should be made between the family babad, which is altered to suit the whims of a single prince, and those babads which relate events affecting the interests of several competing princes, or in which no single prince is especially interested. The Homeric poems, we are told, were kept reasonably free from interpolations by the jealousy of the various Hellenic communities. May not an influence of the same kind have operated in Java, and have preserved some of these chronicles from corruption? That the babad is capable of being approached from two different points of view is apparent from the following extracts, in which I have compared M. Brumund's treatment of a babad of only fifty years ago with Mr. Nieman's account of an earlier babad in the possession of the Royal Asiatic Society. M. Brumund says--