Now this, from the pen of a native scholar, is truly remarkable. The spirit of Niebuhr seems to have reached the shores of India, and this ballad theory comes out more successfully in the history of Buddha than in the history of Romulus. The absence of anything like cant in the mouth of a Brahman speaking of Buddhism, the _bête noire_ of all orthodox Brahmans, is highly satisfactory, and our Sanskrit scholars in Europe will have to pull hard if, with such men as Babu Rajendralal in the field, they are not to be distanced in the race of scholarship. We believe, then, that Babu Rajendralal is right, and we look upon the dialect of the Gâthâs as a specimen of the Sanskrit spoken by the followers of Buddha about the time of A_s_oka and later. And this will help us to understand some of the peculiar changes which the Sanskrit of the Chinese Buddhists must have undergone, even before it was disguised in the strange dress of the Chinese alphabet. The Chinese pilgrims did not hear the Sanskrit pronounced as it was pronounced in the Parishads according to the strict rules of their _S_ikshâ or phonetics. They heard it as it was spoken in Buddhist monasteries, as it was sung in the Gâthâs of Buddhist minstrels, as it was preached in the Vyâkara_n_as or sermons of Buddhist friars. For instance. In the Gâthâs a short a is frequently lengthened. We find nâ instead of na, 'no.' The same occurs in the Sanskrit of the Chinese Buddhists. (See Julien, 'Méthode,' p. 18; p. 21.) We find there also vistâra instead of vistara, &c. In the dialect of the Gâthâs nouns ending in consonants, and therefore irregular, are transferred to the easier declension in a. The same process takes place in modern Greek and in the transition of Latin into Italian; it is, in fact, a general tendency of all languages which are carried on by the stream of living speech. Now this transition from one declension to another had taken place before the Chinese had appropriated the Sanskrit of the Buddhist books. The Sanskrit nabhas becomes nabha in the Gâthâs; locative nabhe, instead of nabhasi. If, therefore, we find in Chinese lo-che for the Sanskrit ra_g_as, dust, we may ascribe the change of r into l to the inability of the Chinese to pronounce or to write an r. We may admit that the Chinese alphabet offered nothing nearer to the sound of _g_a than tche; but the dropping of the final s has no excuse in Chinese, and finds its real explanation in the nature of the Gâthâ dialect. Thus the Chinese Fan-lan-mo does not represent the correct Sanskrit Brahman, but the vulgar form Brahma. The Chinese so-po for sarva, all, thomo for dharma, law, find no explanation in the dialect of the Gâthâs, but the suppression of the r before v and m, is of frequent occurrence in the inscriptions of A_s_oka. The omission of the initial s in words like sthâna, place, sthavira, an elder, is likewise founded on the rules of Pâli and Prâkrit, and need not be placed to the account of the Chinese translators.