The relations existing between China and Tibet have been for such a length of time of so intimate a nature, that, better than any other people, the Chinese are in a position to give us reliable information concerning this secluded and interesting country; for, though we possess such valuable works as Markham's Tibet, various papers by Father Desgodins, the reports of the native travellers employed by the great Trigonometrical Survey of India and those of Sarat Chandra Das, who has within the last ten years twice visited Tibet, these do not by any means cover the whole field of Tibetan geography and ethnography, and all the information we can obtain supplementing or corroborating these works must be valuable and worthy of our attention.

A topography is a description of a country, and such a description comprises that of the land and its inhabitants; detailed and succinct descriptions are both, included in this category of works.

The Chih kung chih t'u contains very careful reproductions of the strange costumes of the vassal tribes which come with tribute to Court. The glory of the reigning dynasty is as great as that of Yao and Shun, and there is no locality however remote which does not seek the Sovereign-ruler's presence. The characteristics and outward appearance (of each of our tributaries) are now all well known, and fully recorded, and the descriptions are not confined to vague portraitures, and to notices on the curiosities of land and water, but set forth exactly the produces of the soil.

At p. 139 of the second edition of Professor Carl Faulmann's “Das Buck der Schrift” will be found a table called the “Kistna” Alphabet. It is supposed to be a special form of writing adopted on and about the Kṛishṇā River on the East coast of India, a part of the country noted for centuries as a centre of religious and secular education, and at the present day recognized as the tract where the purest form of the Telugu language is spoken. The date of the alphabet is not given, but I am prepared to prove that the table is copied from one made out by Prinsep, and published in 1837; that this was itself taken from a single inscription which, was engraved some time between the sixth and eighth or ninth centuries A.D.; and that the special forms given are erroneous and misleading, being copied, not from the original inscription, but from a drawing. In the original the drawing of the inscription itself is fairly accurate, so far as the shape of the letters is concerned, but the alphabet compiled from it by Prinsep is far from satisfactory.

The following inscription, or rather group of three independent inscriptions, is on a tablet of clay numbered K 1280 in the Kouyunjik Collection of the British Museum. The tablet measures by 2⅜ in. (Bezold, Catalogue, p. 257). The obverse contains an inscription of nine lines complete in itself, the reverse two inscriptions of three and six lines respectively, which are separated by a line of division, and a single group of three characters appears on the edge. The texts are clearly written in characters which for the most part present the Assyrian form, though some, as, for instance, zu in the first and riš in the third line of the third inscription, are purely Babylonian.