________________ Introduction them is sufficient to settle the text by distinguishing between the genuine and the spurious matter at the various places of doubt. 2. All the ten manuscript copies, which have been consulted, appear to Manuscript material belong to the same group or and preparation of the press copy. family, as there are no cardinal outstanding differences in readings leading to their division into families. The differences in readings which are merely due to the ignorance of Prakrit or Sanskrit of the scribes or to the provincial peculiarities of pronunciation such as the utterance of I for # have been completely ignored in preparing the present edition. They are not even noted as other readings in the footnotes, as, their number, which is nearly ten to fifteen times that of the variants noticed, would have not only unnecessarily swollen the number of readings but it would have given merely a long list of mutilated and miswritten words. There are also left out unnoticed the differences in readings due to the frequent practice of the substitution of or for t, or to that of reading q in the place of a deleted consonant. The number of real variants which are noticed in the footnotes is small, and a careful perusal of the several readings from
