July, 1873.]

205

REVIEWS.

We miss, however, the beautiful plates of the lat ter, omitted apparently at the suggestion of Colonel Keatinge, as being “very inaccurate”, a

derived from madhu (p. 66); ‘Siv-rāt' is the same as “Sacrant' (Sankrant) and means ‘father night'; the fiews religiosa ‘presents a perfect resemblance to the poplar of Germany and Italy, a species of

character which, as applied to the views, is in most cases, unfortunately, only too correct; still it is

which is the aspen' (p. 73); Lariké of Ptolemy was

somewhat awkward when the reader comes to

Käthiávād, and took its name from the Silar tribe

page 8 and reads,-‘To render this more distinct, I present a profile of the tract described from

Tod most untrustworthy as a guide. And even in

Abu to Kotra,” &c., and to find that this section

what came under his own eye he sometimes sacri

of the country has been condemned to omission with the artistic pictures. At p. 224, the author says he “exhibits the abode of the fair of Ceylon"— meaning the palace of Padmani, but it is not to be seen; and again at p. 576 we read of “the Jain temple before the reader, and asketch of the fortress [of Komalmer] itself, both finished on the spot,” and yet neither of them is before the reader. And

fices truth to effect: thus, describing an old temple at Komalmer (vol. I. p. 577) he says,

so in other cases.

This

of

course is one

of

(p. 104); and so on, Lendless inaccuracies rendering

“The extreme want of decoration best attests its

antiquity, entitling us to attribute it to that period when Sampriti Rāja, of the family of Chandra gupta, was paramount savereign over all these

regions (200 years B.C.). . . The proportions and forms of the columns are especially distinct from the other temples, being slight and tapering in

the results of the want of editing : another is the

stead of massive, the general characteristic of Hindu

uncorrected

author himself had

architecture; while the projecting cornices, which

pointed out a few of those in volume I. but even of them only one has been corrected; and on page 25, where, by a misprint of ‘or' for ‘on,' the ori ginal had “Maheswar, or the Nerbudda river,” the reprint has “Mahéswas, or the Nerbudda river,” while at p. 51 we have “perpetua larchon,” exactly as in the quarto. But no writer is more in need of careful editing than Tod: his book is as readable as his opinions

would absolutely deform shafts less slight, are peculiarly indicative of the Takshac architect. . . It is curious to contemplate the possibility, nay the probability, that the Jain temple now before the reader may have been designed by Grecian artists, or that the taste of the artists among the Rājputs may have been modelled after the Gre

errata.

The

are often rash and fanciful.

His facts—where he

confines himself to facts—are interesting and im portant, and are fortunately so numerous as to give his work a high value in spite of his very illegitimate and misleading etymologies, on which he frequently hangs whole theories of ethnology. His imagination is never at a loss : from a few names having each a syllable or so alike, he can reconstruct whole chapters of lost history. In Chapter II. he cites (p. 28) the Agni Purán a for ‘the genealogies of the Surya and Indu (moon) races,'—but they are not found there. A little further on, he makes the Pāndavas the sons of Vyasu by Pandea (p. 29); he would make his

• Barusar the son of Chandragupta” the same as

the ‘Abisares' of the Greek writers (p. 38); Raja

griha is ‘the modern Rājmahāl' (p. 39); ‘Dush khanta,’ as he names Dushyanta, is “the father of

Śakuntalā, married to Bharat' (p. 40); Tanjore he makes the probable capital of ‘the Regio Pandiona’ of Ptolemy; Un-des, the country of the Shawl

goat or Tibet, he makes An-des, in order to identify it with Anga-desa (p. 41); Valmika (as he calls Valmiki) and Vyasu ‘were cotemporaries' (p. 42); Marco Polo was at Kashgar “in the sixth century'

(p. 56); the Jaxartes is the same as the Jihoon (p. 57); madhu means “a bee' in Sanskrit, and the name of the drink extracted from the Mahuà tree is

cian.”

Yet after all this and much more confi

dent assertion, no competent critic looking at the plate “before the reader” in the first edition, would be disposed to relegate the temple to an

earlier age than about A.D. 1500; and indeed it bears this inscription upon it, which shows more

over that it never was a Jaina temple,_

II ºf Hà-TTāfāqī āū: ll

• TERTGſſºſ.T.ſ Tſſºſ ºf {{Tſū Hāſaſ

aſſà, TAT gºſT ºff ºf Hå fåT

qxaſ HH Kºº, #f TRHB 13, HTT

z Słºńſa II 2 || Tº HH || showing clearly enough that the temple was scarcely more than three centuries old when he saw it, dating only from the reign of Rånå San grâm, A.D. 1514. Yet with all its errors and de fects, Tod's work is one of sterling value, and well worthy of careful study; and whilst some will regret the want of references in this new edition to later and more trustworthy writers, and the correction of errors, or, perhaps, that the wheat has not to some extent been separated from the chaff by the judicious omission of the greater por tion of the merely fanciful speculations of the author, all interested in it will feel grateful to the publishers for bringing so convenient and careful a reprint within their reach.