In the case of one Jātaka (Fausböll, No. 276), the Conclusion is wholly in verse; and in several cases the Conclusion contains a verse or verses added by way of moral. Such verses, when they occur, are called _Abhisambuddha-gāthā_, or Verses spoken by the Buddha, not when he was still only a Bodisat, but when he had become a Buddha. They are so called to distinguish them from the similar verses inserted in the Birth Story, and spoken there by the Bodisat. Each story has its verse or verses, either in the _Atīta-vatthu_ or in the Conclusion, and sometimes in both. The number of cases in which all the verses are _Abhisambuddha-gāthā_ is relatively small (being only one in ten of the Jātakas published[97]); and the number of cases in which they occur together with verses in the _Atīta-vatthu_ is very small indeed (being only five out of the three hundred Jātakas published[98]); in the remaining two hundred and sixty-five the verse or verses occur in the course of the Birth Story, and are most generally spoken by the Bodisat himself. There are several reasons for supposing that these verses are older than the prose which now forms their setting. The Ceylon tradition goes so far as to say that the original Jātaka Book, now no longer extant, consisted of the verses alone; that the Birth Stories are Commentary upon them; and the Introductory Stories, the Conclusions and the ‘_Pada-gata-sannaya_,’ or word-for-word explanation of the verses, are Commentary on this Commentary.[99] And archaic forms and forced constructions in the verses (in striking contrast with the regularity and simplicity of the prose parts of the book), and the corrupt state in which some of the verses are found, seem to point to the conclusion that the verses are older. But I venture to think that, though the present form of the verses may be older than the present form of the Birth Stories, the latter, or most of the latter, were in existence first; that the verses, at least in many cases, were added to the stories, after they had become current; and that the Birth Stories without verses in them at all--those enumerated in the list in note 1 on the last page, where the verses are found only in the Conclusion--are, in fact, among the oldest, if not the oldest, in the whole collection. For any one who takes the trouble to go through that list seriatim will find that it contains a considerable number of those stories which, from their being found also in the Pāli Piṭakas or in the oldest European collections, can already be proved to belong to a very early date. The only hypothesis which will reconcile these facts seems to me to be that the Birth Stories, though probably originally older than the verses they contain, were handed down in Ceylon till the time of the compilation of our present Jātaka Book, in the Siŋhalese language; whilst the verses on the other hand were not translated, but were preserved as they were received, in Pāli.