central pin, and the whole, amounting to fifty leaves, inclosed in a rosewood box. This may account for the unwillingness of the priests to part with their old MSS., whether Sanskrit or Pâli, but it proves at the same time that they still exist, and naturally keeps up the hope that some day or other we may still get a sight of them. _Materials on which Sanskrit MSS. were written._ Of course, it might be said that if MSS. did not last very long in India, neither would they do so in China. But even then, we might expect at least that as in India the old MSS. were copied whenever they showed signs of decay, so they would have been in China. Besides, the climate of China is not so destructive as the heat and moisture of the climate of India. In India, MSS. seldom last over a thousand years. Long before that time paper made of vegetable substances decays, palm-leaves and birch-bark become brittle, and white ants often destroy what might have escaped the ravages of the climate. It was the duty, therefore, of Indian Rajahs to keep a staff of librarians, who had to copy the old MSS. whenever they began to seem unsafe, a fact which accounts both for the modern date of most of our Sanskrit MSS. and for the large number of copies of the same text often met with in the same library. The MSS. carried off to China were in all likelihood not written on paper, or whatever we like to call the material which Nearchus describes “as cotton well beaten together,”(111) but on the bark of the birch tree or on palm leaves. The bark of trees is mentioned as a writing material used in India by Curtius;(112) and in Buddhist Sûtras, such as the Kara_nd_a-vyûha (p. 69), we actually read of bhûr_g_a, birch, mâsi, ink, and karama (kalam), as the common requisites for writing. MSS. written on that material have long been known in Europe, chiefly as curiosities (I had to write many years ago about one of them, preserved in the Library at All Souls’ College). Of late,(113) however, they have attracted more serious attention, particularly since Dr. Bühler discovered in Kashmir old MSS. containing independent rescensions of Vedic texts, written on birch bark. One of these, containing the whole text of the Rig-Veda Sa_m_hitâ(114) with accents, was sent to me, and though it had suffered a good deal, particularly on the margins, it shows that there was no difficulty in producing from the bark of the birch tree thousands and thousands of pages of the largest quarto or even folio size, perfectly smooth and pure, except for the small dark lines peculiar to the bark of that tree.(115)