It seems not unreasonable to suppose, therefore, that this set of the Reports reached the Royal Asiatic Society after passing out of Prinsep's possession; and further that no copy of the Journals, as well as of the drawings and maps, was made before the originals were forwarded to the Court of Directors, since no such copy is included in these volumes. This fact was probably not realised in 1871, when permission was given to Sir W. W. Hunter to bring the India Office collection of the manuscripts temporarily back to India, as the original Journals, of which no copy had been retained, were thus exposed twice again to the risk of total loss at sea.

These Journals of Buchanan's tours in the Districts of South Bihar seem to have attracted very little attention hitherto, probably owing to their close resemblance to portions of the corresponding Reports, and to the greater importance of the latter. The following extract from Mr. H. Beveridge's article on "The Buchanan Records in the Calcutta Review for July 1894 is the only published reference to them which I have been able to trace:

"There is a good deal of repetition in Buchanan, and some portions of his folios are taken up with his Journal, e.g., his Bhagalpur and Shahabad Journal, which does not contain anything material that is not also in his report." This statement is not strictly correct, as will be indicated later, and even if it were, it appears that the publication of the Journals, especially the PatnaGaya Journal, can serve a useful purpose at the present time, because much of the material included both in the Journals and in the Reports has never yet been published. Montgomery Martin's methods as editor of "Eastern India ", the three-volume abridgment of the Reports published in 1838, have been justly condemned by everyone who has examined the original manuscripts. In deciding what portions of the Reports should be omitted, he followed no consistent plan, but merely, as Sir W. W. Hunter observed, left out "the parts which he did not understand or which did not interest

him". Matters of topographical and antiquarian interest are the principal feature of the Journals, and in these respects the Reports, and particularly the Report on the districts of Patna and Gaya, have greatly suffered at his hands. On this point Beveridge says:

"On the whole I have not found that Mr. Martin has suppressed much of value in the historical or antiquarian chapters. For instance, there are no suppressions in the account of Gaur, which by the way, is to be found in the Purniah volumes. The most serious omissions are in the accounts of Patna and Shahabad. There Mr. Martin has drawn his pencil through much interesting matter, though in not a few cases he has afterwards repented and written "stet". In all the volumes he has omitted a good deal of the descriptive matter, and he has greatly abridged the elaborate account of castes which occurs in the first of the three volumes relating to Purniah."

During his tour of the districts of Patna and Gaya, Buchanan naturally came across antiquities considerably more extensive and important than those contained in the districts which he had previously surveyed, and his description of them may be regarded as the special feature of the Patna Report. Unfortunately, though fifth in natural sequence, it was the first on which Martin began his work of abridgment, and he carried it out with special severity, as may be judged by the fact that approximately 167 out of the 370 pages in the M. S. Report which form the chapter on topography and antiquities have been omitted from the corresponding Chapter III of Eastern India, Volume I. This represents about sixty of the pages as printed in that volume, and the omissions include the whole of the account of Maner, as well as important portions of the descriptions f Patna, Gaya, Bodh Gaya, Rajgir and Baragaon. With the exception of Patna itself, Buchanan's observations at each of these places are adequately recorded in the Journal.

Notwithstanding Mr. Beveridge's unfavourable opinion, which was probably based on a somewhat cursory examination of the manuscripts, there are several respects in which the Journals are an extremely useful

supplement to the Reports, even in places where the latter have not been abridged. They principally differ from the Reports in giving a detailed description of the route which Buchanan actually followed, without which it is at the present day very difficult to identify some of the places described in the Reports, particularly the various hills and the mines, quarries, caves or springs associated with them. Many examples of this which have come within myown observation could be quoted, but the following will suffice :-In the Bhagalpur Report (East. Ind. Vol. II, pp. 184-85) Buchanan describes "a calcareous matter in mass, called Asurhar, or Giant's bones", which was used for making lime, and says that" the greatest quantity is found at a place, in the centre of the (Kharagpur) hills, called Asurni, or the female Giant". The manufacture of lime from this source has long been discontinued, and as the existence of the place appears to be unknown to the Koras and Naiyas who now live in the vicinity, it would be almost impossible to find it without reference to the Journal. This gives not only the route taken on March 22nd, 1811, from Bharari along the valley of the Anjan (Azan), but also a rough sketch showing the position of the quarry itself at the head of a side valley near Karahara, by means of which the remains of the kilns, etc., can be found without the least difficulty, although they are concealed by thick jungle. Similarly, in the Patna Report (Vol. I, pp. 254-256) the interesting description of the cave "at a place called Hangriyo in the southern range of the Rajgir Hills from which silajit was procured, was not sufficient to enable me to identify this cave without reference to the Journal for January 14th, 1812. This showed that the cave was not the Rajpind Cave in the Jethian valley, as I had been inclined to suppose, but one in the southern face of the Hanria Hill, the existence of which is kept as secret as possible owing to the value of the silajit still obtained from it; and an examination of this cave has served to clear up several difficulties connected with Hiuen Tsang's route between Bodh Gaya and Rajgir,

and has shown that the Hanria Hill itself was Hiuen Tsang's Buddhavana Mountain.

Another feature of the Journals is that they frequently contain minor details which Buchanan did not consider of sufficient importance to include in the Reports, but which are of value in unexpected ways. For instance, in measuring the temperature of a hot spring in order to ascertain the nature of its seasonal or secular variation, a problem in which I have been interested for the last fourteen years, it is of particular importance that the thermometer should be placed, if possible, in exactly the same part of the spring as that observed on previous occasions. In the Bhagalpur Report (Volume II, page 200) when describing the hot springs near Bharari in the Kharagpur Hills, Buchanan

says:

"The thermometer on being placed in a crevice of the rock, from whence the water issued accompanied by air bubbles, rose to 150°."

There usually are at these springs four or five places which might answer to this description, at none of which is the temperature either identical or constant, but the corresponding passage in the Journal removes all uncertainty, since it can only refer to one particular place :

"Where the finest spring is, and the water issues immediately from the foot of the hill, without running any way under the stones, and is accompanied by many air bubbles, the thermometer arises to 150°."

No other hot spring in Bihar, issuing in its natural state directly from the earth instead of rising, as it usually is made to do, into the water already contained in a tank or kund, can be identified with such absolute certainty as this. Since 1909, I have measured its temperature on several occasions, at different seasons of the year; and as the maximum temperature noticed, after allowing for all necessary corrections, has never exceeded 149°, and as there is no reason to suppose that there has been in this case any measurable

change of a secular nature even in the last hundred years, the inference is that the thermometer which Buchanan used in his measurements on hot springs read at least one degree Fahr. too high. This is confirmed by similar though less reliable comparisons elsewhere, such as at Bhimbandh, Sitakund near Monghyr, and Rajgir; and in any case is likely enough, since the discovery that all ordinary mercury-in-glass thermometers, even if correctly graduated when first made, read too high as they grow older was not made until 1822, so that Buchanan was not aware that any correction of his own thermometer was necessary. It may be mentioned that one of the thermometers which I have used for making these comparisons shows this effect plainly enough, in spite of the precautions now taken by the instrument-makers, as it reads 0-5 degree Fahr. higher than it did when it was graduated by them, and 0.1 degree higher than when it was first compared in October 1912.

In these Journals it is interesting to notice the care with which Buchanan tested the truth of any statements made to him, whenever opportunities occurred later; as well as, in general, the thoroughness with which he had adopted the principles of modern scientific research. A good example of his methods is shown in the present Journal, in the endeavours which he made, though without much success, to obtain a criterion by which Buddhist and Jain images could be distinguished from one another. The hot springs of Bihar, which he was the first to describe, have been examined by several later observers, such as Kittoe, Sherwill and Waddell, but their own accounts are in no case so detailed or precise, and in fact possess very little scientific value.

Buchanan had practically no works of reference to assist him in identifying the antiquities of Bihar, such as the Travels of the Chinese pilgrims which have revealed so much to later archæologists, and it is not surprising that at times he rejected information which