hierarchical organizations, scarcely distinguishable from those of Roman Catholicism; and yet a greater contrast than that presented by the essential doctrines of Buddhism and of Christianity can scarcely be imagined. Strangest of all, Buddhism—with no God higher than the perfect man—has no pretensions to be called a religion in the true sense of the word, and is wholly destitute of the vivifying forces necessary to give vitality to the dry bones of its own morality; and yet it once existed as a real power over at least a third of the human race, and even at the present moment claims a vast number of adherents in Asia, and not a few sympathisers in Europe and America. Evidently, then, any Orientalist who undertakes to give a clear and concise account of Buddhism in the compass of a few lectures, must find himself engaged in a very venturesome and difficult task. Happily we are gaining acquaintance with the Southern or purest form of Buddhism through editions and translations of the texts of the Pāli Canon by Fausböll, Childers, Rhys Davids, Oldenberg, Morris, Trenckner, L. Feer, etc. We owe much, too, to the works of Turnour, Hardy, Clough, Gogerly, D’Alwis, Burnouf, Lassen, Spiegel, Weber, Koeppen, Minayeff, Bigandet, Max Müller, Kern, Ed. Müller, E. Kuhn, Pischel, and others. These enable us to form a fair estimate of what Buddhism was in its early days. But the case is different when we turn to the Northern Buddhist Scriptures, written generally in tolerably correct Sanskṛit (with Tibetan translations). These continue to be little studied, notwithstanding the materials placed at our command and the good work done, first by the distinguished ‘founder of the study of Buddhism,’ Brian Hodgson, and by Burnouf, Wassiljew, Cowell, Senart, Kern, Beal, Foucaux, and others. In fact, the moment we pass from the Buddhism of India, Ceylon, Burma, and Siam, to that of Nepāl, Kashmīr, Tibet, Bhutān, Sikkim, China, Mongolia, Manchuria, Corea, and Japan, we seem to have entered a labyrinth, the clue of which is continually slipping from our hands. Nor is it possible to classify the varying and often conflicting systems in these latter countries, under the one general title of Northern Buddhism. For indeed the changes which religious systems undergo, even in countries adjacent to each other, not unfrequently amount to an entire reversal of their whole character. We may illustrate these changes by the variations of words derived from one and the same root in neighbouring countries. Take, for example, the German words selig, ‘blessed,’ and knabe, ‘a boy,’ which in England are represented by ‘silly’ and ‘knave.’