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Imperial Gazetteer of India, v. 2, p. 86.

86 THE INDIANV ERMPIRE [CHAP. inscriptions, with translations of them, and with such explanatory comments as can be appropriately given with the texts, instead of being worked up into special articles of greater length in the Indian Antiquary and in the journals of the various learned societies. That journal is the E igraphia Indica, started in i888 or 1889, and now in its eighth volume. It is in the charge of an editor whose duty and pleasure it is to welcome all contributions to it, to advise and encourage novices, and generally to co-operate in the satisfactory publica- tion of all communications sent in to him for it. And by the size of its pages, and the freedom with which facsimiles are issued to accompany articles in it, it is better suited than any other journal to the preliminary exploration of the inscriptions, as a necessary precursor of an ultimate grouping of them in the volumes of the Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum. The pages of that journal have been filled to good purpose by those who have already been engaged in this line of work. But we want more workers to join us. And we look for recruits specially to the class of scholars who have a certain knowledge of Sanskrit to start with; because, though most of the records are not in Sanskrit, that tongue is more or less the key to the languages in which they were written, and a general knowledge of Sanskrit literature and mythology is essential to a proper understanding of many of the allusions in the records. At the same time, anyone who has made himself conversant with one of the vernaculars in its archaic form and ancient literature, has necessarily acquired, by that process, a consider- able acquaintance with the Sanskrit vocabulary, and can easily master, by general reading, what else is wanted. A preliminary knowledge of Sanskrit itself, therefore, is by no means absolutely indispensable. As regards other leading languages, in Kanarese at any rate we have, in the Rev. F. Kittel's Kannada-English Dictionary (1894) and Grammar of the Kannada Language (1903), two most scholarly and admirable compilations, which have now placed it in the power of all western students to understand fully, and do justice to, the beauties of that highly polished and powerful tongue; and in the three volumes of Dr. Hultzsch's South-Indian Inscriptions we have a number of carefully edited versions, a study of which would go far towards removing any difficulties in the way of grappling with the epigraphic peculiarities of Tamil. It is no specially difficult matter now to approach the epigraphic records. And a very brief study of some of the