“As I was residing in the Monastery at Kanum, I took an opportunity of getting access to the Tibetan Encyclopædia, by stepping in behind the officiating Lama when he came to worship. On discovering me he made some civil remonstrance, and then allowed me to stand behind the door when he slowly opened the folding leaves of the library, and in the interval I stepped up and looked over his shoulders. The works, being distinct, are arranged in separate places. These resemble large chests or cisterns, standing on end, and partitioned into cells, each containing a volume, which is carefully wrapped within many folds, laced with cord, and bound tightly between boards of cypress or cedar. The ‘Kahgyur’ is a work of morality, and is, in fact, the Bible, and consists, I believe, of 104 folio volumes, each containing from 500 to 700 pages, all beautifully printed from wooden types. The ‘Stangyur’ is more copious, comprising 240 volumes, and treats upon arts and science. Five volumes are devoted to medicine; the others comprehend astronomy, astrology, rhetoric, poesy, philosophy, history, and a vast variety of subjects. Some of the volumes were opened before me, and I gazed with a sort of reverential feeling upon such gigantic compilations yet unfolded to the world, and thought of the humble individual in the hamlet who was occupied in illustrating their unexplored contents. It is rather singular that those works should be found planted in a Hindoo village, or, at least, established amongst people who are not alienated from Hindoo tenets, though tinctured with Buddhist principles; but poor Moorcroft mentions, in his tour to Mansarowur, having seen a greater number of Hindoo images in the Tartar village of Dala, than he ever recollected meeting with before in India, at any one spot. The contrast is, however, great, though there is both identity and unity in their divinity and chief duties, for Mr. Csoma affirms that the Tibetan faith, both in precept and practice, approaches nearer to the Christian religion than that of any Asiatic nation whatever. The Tibetan works appear to have been very widely disseminated throughout that country, and we may safely ascribe this multiplicity of books to the facility which the art of printing afforded. We find fragments and manuscripts of great antiquity scattered about and deposited in situations which are now almost deserted by man. At the village of Skuno, which lay in my route, and is planted upon the eastern frontier of Kunawur, near the confines of China, at a height of 12,000 feet, is a labrung or monastery, a melancholy record of better times. Here the traveller beholds files of printed papers full of learning, bound up in cypress boards, as if shut for the last time. I had a Chinese