On the medallion in the Muttra Museum, the medallion itself in more detail. J. B, O R. S., 1920. Kuntaline Press, Calcutta. decipher every one of them. If we want to ensure their complete unravelling, the first thing to do is to have them properly reproduced and published, thus bringing them home to every Indianist all over the world. We may safely expect that those scholars, having once seen them, will keep them in their mind's eye, and sooner or later will identify them, one by one, in the course of their studies. If I may insist upon what an already long experience has taught me, we cannot hope-except for very few of them indeed-to understand those mute stories straight from. an examination of the stone, but only through the help of some book. Not only may no identification be considered as reliable and secure, until it is confirmed by the bringing together of bas-relief and text; but, in most cases, we should never guess at all the meaning of the scene except for the written hint across which we may happen to come, usually by chance. The top medallion of a sandstone railing-pillar now lying in the Museum at Mathura (see Pl......) may well serve as an illustration of the preceding remarks. Its simple style of decoration precludes any doubt about its belonging to the old Indian School, still free from Gandhara influence, although the easy sitting posture of the man, seen three-quarters, already shows a considerable advance in the technique. We have to deal with the usual type of the Brahmanical anchoret, known to us through so many replicas and easily recognizable by his heavy chignon, his beard and his short garments. He is seated on a kind of rolled-up mat (brishi) at the door of his round hut, the walls of which are clearly made of reeds and the roof covered with leaves (parṇa-salā). His elbows on his bent knees and his hands extended forward, he is engaged in an earnest conversation with four wild inhabitants of his jungly hermitage, artlessly superposed in front of him along the rim of the halfmedallion, viz. a crow, a dove, a kneeling doe and a coiled snake. When first I saw this carving, a year ago, I felt sure at once that it represented some birth-story; but which, I was then unable to say. As such a list of dramatis persona could be found neither in the Pali Jātaka nor among the Five hundred |