4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and part of one blade of (a) pair of scissors.*20 Marshall cites Flinders Peters for the statement that scissors came into use in the Graeco-Roman world about first century A.D.; and Needham seems to confirm this.21 The earliest finds of scissors in China do not go beyond the Tang dynasty (7th-9th century); and it would appear therefore that scissors were really a Hellenistic invention, and that there was an eastward diffusion of this invention from which India and later China benefited.22 The second invention, of more firmly established Hellenistic origins, was the rotary grain mill. So far grain seems to have been milled by use of mortar-and-pestle, or, what was obviously a development from it, the saddle quem, where there was a small stone rolled over a larger stone board.23 Through developments, which we need not go into here, by the second century B.C. the Mediterranean world had developed a hand-driven mill, with two horizontal handles on each side of the upper stone by which a back-and-forth swinging motion was achieved.24 At Taxila in the Bhir mound, occupied down to B.C. c. 200 the mortar-and-pestle mill was in use; but at Sirkap, in stratum II, *not earlier than first century A.D.,' was found the Mediterranean mill with two handles.2^ The semi-rotary mill had thus arrived. The next development was for the mill to achieve full rotary motion: this would involve (a) substitution of one handle for the previous two, and (b) the transformation of the single handle from a horizontal peg to a vertical crank-handle. Lynn White cites an early example (126 A.D) from the Roman world, but in Marshall's second 'grinding mill' from Taxila (Kunala monastery, 5th century A.D.) we have a single vertical peg-hole, as shown clearly in the published photograph.26 The short passage of time which elapsed between the appearances of the scmi-rOtary and rotary hand-mills in the Mediterranean world, and their respective appearances at Taxila confirm its continuing connexion with the Hellenistic world. For this connexion there is, of course, other ample evidence: the survival of the Greek language on Kushana coinage; the even longer survival of the Greek script as the transmitter of the Bactrian language; and the evolution of Gandhara art On the other hand, Taxila was also an Indian town, a centre of Buddhism; and so from this gateway, the Hellenistic invention, the rotary quem, was passed on to be diffused in course of time to reach practically every Indian hut and home.27 Inherent in the developments in milling in the Mediterranean world was the evolution of a still more crucial device, the draw-bar. To us this looks so simple that it is hard for us to imagine why it should have taken our anc estors so many centuries to convert the yoke designed for linear draught into the draw-bar for rotary motion. But centuries it