antiquarian research on the native mind of India. Babu Rajendralal reads Sanskrit of course with the greatest ease. He is a pandit by profession, but he is at the same time a scholar and critic in our sense of the word. He has edited Sanskrit texts after a careful collation of MSS., and in his various contributions to the 'Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal,' he has proved himself completely above the prejudices of his class, freed from the erroneous views on the history and literature of India in which every Brahman is brought up, and thoroughly imbued with those principles of criticism which men like Colebrooke, Lassen, and Burnouf have followed in their researches into the literary treasures of his country. His English is remarkably clear and simple, and his arguments would do credit to any Sanskrit scholar in England. We quote from his remarks on Burnouf's account of the Gâthâs, as given in that scholar's 'Histoire du Buddhisme Indien:' 'Burnouf's opinion on the origin of the Gâthâs, we venture to think, is founded on a mistaken estimate of Sanskrit style. The poetry of the Gâthâ has much artistic elegance which at once indicates that it is not the composition of men who were ignorant of the first principles of grammar. The authors display a great deal of learning, and discuss the subtlest questions of logic and metaphysics with much tact and ability, and it is difficult to conceive that men who were perfectly familiar with the most intricate forms of Sanskrit logic, who have expressed the most abstruse metaphysical ideas in precise and often in beautiful language, who composed with ease and elegance in Ârya, To_t_aka, and other difficult measures, were unacquainted with the rudiments of the language in which they wrote, and were unable to conjugate the verb to be in all its forms.... The more reasonable conjecture appears to be that the Gâthâ is the production of bards who were contemporaries or immediate successors of _S_âkya, who recounted to the devout congregations of the prophet of Magadha, the sayings and doings of their great teacher in popular and easy-flowing verses, which in course of time came to be regarded as the most authentic source of all information connected with the founder of Buddhism. The high estimation in which the ballads and improvisations of bards are held in India and particularly in the Buddhist writings, favours this supposition; and the circumstance that the poetical portions are generally introduced in corroboration of the narration of the prose, with the words "Thereof this may be said," affords a strong presumptive evidence.'