The relative proportions of saved and lost text are highly significant:—Babur's commemorable years are about 47 and 10 months, _i.e._ from his birth on Feb. 14th 1483 to near his death on Dec. 26th 1530; but the aggregate of surviving text records some 18 years only, and this not continuously but broken through by numerous gaps. That these gaps result from loss of pages is frequently shewn by a broken sentence, an unfinished episode. The fragments—as they truly may be called—are divided by gaps sometimes seeming to remove a few pages only (cf. _s.a._ 935 AH.), sometimes losing the record of 6 and _cir._ 18 months, sometimes of 6 and 11 years; besides these actual clefts in the narrative there are losses of some 12 years from its beginning and some 16 months from its end. Briefly put we now have the record of _cir._ 18 years where that of over 47 could have been.[9] c. _Causes of the gaps._ Various causes have been surmised to explain the _lacunæ_; on the plea of long intimacy with Babur's and Haidar's writings, I venture to say that one and all appear to me the result of accident. This opinion rests on observed correlations between the surviving and the lost record, which demand complement—on the testimony of Haidar's extracts, and firmly on Babur's orderly and persistent bias of mind and on the prideful character of much of the lost record. Moreover occasions of risk to Babur's papers are known. Of these occasions the first was the destruction of his camp near Hisar in 1512 (918; p. 357) but no information about his papers survives; they may not have been in his tent but in the fort. The second was a case of recorded damage to "book and sections" (p. 679) occurring in 1529 (935). From signs of work done to the Farghana section in Hindustan, the damage may be understood made good at the later date. To the third exposure to damage, namely, the attrition of hard travel and unsettled life during Humayun's 14 years of exile from rule in Hindustan (1441-1555) it is reasonable to attribute even the whole loss of text. For, assuming—as may well be done—that Babur left (1530) a complete autobiography, its volume would be safe so long as Humayun was in power but after the Timurid exodus (1441) his library would be exposed to the risks detailed in the admirable chronicles of Gul-badan, Jauhar and Bayazid (_q.v._). He is known to have annotated his father's book in 1555 (p. 466 n. 1) just before marching from Kabul to attempt the re-conquest of Hindustan. His Codex would return to Dihli which he entered in July 1555, and there would be safe from risk of further mutilation. Its condition in 1555 is likely to have remained what it was found when `Abdu'r-rahim translated it into Persian by Akbar's orders (1589) for Abu'l-faẓl's use in the _Akbar-nama_. That Persian translation with its descendant the _Memoirs of Baber_, and the purely-Turki Haidarabad Codex with its descendant the _Babur-nama in English_, contain identical contents and, so doing, carry