PREFACE.

PK 103
C6

1873

v, 2

COLEBROOKE'S collected essays were edited in two volumes by Dr. Rosen in 1837, and the work was published during its gifted author's last illness. The different essays, comprised in the edition, had been published at various intervals during the previous forty years, and from their first appearance they had won for their author a pre-eminent place among all Oriental scholars. In every part his calm judgment and minute accuracy were no less conspicuous than his vast learning and industry; nearly every essay seemed to exhaust its respective subject, or even, when it was only a sketch, it was still so vigorously drawn that succeeding inquirers had little left to do but to fill up the outlines and add minute details. Nearly forty years have passed since the publication of the collected series, and great advances have been made in our knowledge of ancient India and its literature; but these essays still retain their ground. Succeeding scholars have accumulated stores of fresh

materials, and they have in many respects widened our view by new facts and fuller details; but Colebrooke's calm judgment had generally seized the main points of interest, and anticipated the results of these later researches.

Some years ago Dr. Hall had planned a new edition of the Essays, which was to have contained a body of notes, bringing up the work to the state of our knowledge at the present time. Dr. Hall was himself to have annotated the greater part of the work, while Professor Whitney had promised to contribute the notes to the Essay on the Vedas, and those on the Indian Astronomy and Algebra. I much regret that this undertaking was afterwards abandoned; as we have thus lost those continual outpourings of interesting information, with which the Editor of the "Vishnu Puráņa" would have undoubtedly enriched the text; and the Mathematical Essays also would have been edited by a mathematician.

Sir T. E. Colebrooke subsequently requested me to undertake the superintendence of the new edition, but I only consented to do so on a much more limited plan. My object has been to edit Colebrooke's Essays in a similar manner to that in which I edited Elphinstone's History of India. I have endeavoured to correct any important errors, and to

give notes on those points, respecting which new facts have come to light, and to subjoin references to other works where the reader may find further information; but I have not attempted to comprise in the book a complete record of all that is known on each of the subjects of which it successively treats. I have rather left the essays as they originally stood, and have only tried to give those few corrections and additions, which seemed needed in order that the book might fulfil the purpose of its author.

In one essay, however, I have deviated from this plan. When I began to collect my materials, I learned that Professor Whitney had already prepared his notes for the Essay on the Vedas before the former plan had been relinquished, and I gladly accepted his kind offer to transfer them to the present edition. This essay was the only one which was confessedly behind the present state of our knowledge. It had been written many years before any Vaidik text had been printed; and during the last thirty years German scholars have thrown a flood of light on this dark portion of Hindu antiquity. For this essay, therefore, continual notes on a more extended plan were absolutely necessary; and Professor Whitney has furnished a complete commentary, which will enable the reader to fill up the outlines of the original

essay with the successive discoveries of later scholars. It is only just, however, to the annotator to remind the reader that the notes were originally prepared some years ago, and consequently the lesser details have not been always supplied for the literature of the last three or four years.

In the Essay on the Philosophical Doctrines of the Jainas and the Chárvákas, Colebrooke had expressly mentioned the deficiency of his materials; and I have therefore ventured to add as an appendix a translation of part of the two chapters of Mádhava's Sarvadarśana-sangraha, which treated of those systems. I had originally thought of adding similar translations of the corresponding chapters of that work at the end of each of the other essays on the Hindu philosophies, as Mádhava's summaries have often reminded me of Colebrooke's own masterly analyses; but I feared that it would be too great a deviation from my plan.

In addition to the Essays originally comprised in the edition of 1837, I have added at the end of the first volume the Prefaces to "the Digest of Hindu Law," and to the translation of "Two Treatises on the Hindu Law of Inheritance," and the Essays on "Hindu Courts of Justice," and on "Indian Weights and Measures ;" and in the second volume I have given as an appendix to the Astronomical Essays the

reply to Bentley's remarks in his "Hindu Astronomy," which Colebrooke published in 1826 in the Asiatic Journal. I have also added the translation of the Sánkhya-káriká as an Appendix to the Essay on the Sánkhya philosophy.

I have ventured in some points to alter the original spelling of the Sanskrit words, and to bring it into general harmony with the usually accepted system of transliteration. The use of c for k, and of c'h, t'h for kh and th is disagreeable to the eye, and puzzling to the ordinary reader, especially as they are now retained in few books of general reference. I have tacitly corrected most obvious errors of a merely verbal nature, especially in the first volume; but I am sorry to see that several in the second volume escaped my notice, and these I have pointed out in the Errata. The second volume was printed before the first; and hence there is a slight want of uniformity in the printing of the proper names in the first few sheets of the second volume.

My warm thanks are due to Prof. R. Childers for kindly contributing a note on the twelve nidánas of the Buddhists, which illustrates this obscure doctrine from the Páli books of Ceylon-our most authentic materials for ancient Buddhism.

E. B. C.