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MAY, 1877.]
BOOK NOTICES.
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east a door 43 inches high in opening, and 26 wide, surmounted by a small cornice (the only ornament about the building), and flanked by two small ball's-eye ventilators.
It is obvious that if such a building were combined with the Tower, instead of erected besido it, the resemblance to the Nurhag would be very close,-- quite as close as that of a modern Hindu temple to one of the tenth century A.D. It may be added that as the Towers of Silence are aban
doned, and new ones built, every thirty or forty years, a population practising this method of sepulture would not take many centuries to erect three thousand of them. I hope some writer better acquainted than myself with fire-worship in Irån and India will correct any errors which I may havo fallen into, and supplement my deficiencies, but that in any case I may prove to have. advanced one step towards the solution of this curious problem.
BOOK NOTICES. The ARCHXOLOGY and MONUMENTAL REMAINS of DEHLI. But the city was also frequently visited, and occa
By Carr Stephen, late Judge of the Court of Small Causes, Dehli. 1 vol. (with photographs). Ludhiana Mission
sionally described, by Europeans during the last Press, 1876.
three hundred years. It may have been visited Dehli has long claimed a monograph which shall even earlier by them, as Rubruquis, who wrote in do justice to its historical preëminence, commer- the thirteenth century, mentions that Europeans cial importance, and architectural magnificence. were then in the service of the great Tatar Khans The materials for such a work exist in abundance, of Central Asia, as they were in the following and the present time too would have been one century,-the notorious Sir John de Mandeville peculiarly fitting for such a publication. It has, having been thus employed during part of his chehowever, been left to a private individual to do for quered career. It is quite justifiable to conjecture the city, with some degree of completeness, what that some of these adventurers found their way to was obviously so long required to be done.
northern India and Dehli, as they afterwards did The materials for the reconstruction of Hindu to the western coast in the galleys of the Turks Dehli, both in monuments, coins, and manu- (see Webbe's Travels in Arber's Reprints). scripts, are exceedingly scanty. Unless the Ar. The Englishman Newberry must have passed chæological Survey or some wealthy antiquarian through Dehli about 1585-86 when he parted undertakes excavations at the supposed site of company with Fitch, at Agra, to proceed to Persia Indraprastha, and at the more modern city of vil Láhor. Eighteen years afterwards (1603), and which the massive walls still encircle the Kutb five after the establishment of the English East Minar, we must be content to remain profoundly India Company, John Mildenhall passed the opignorant of the events of the 2700 years of posite way, from LAhor to Agra. Salbank, who conjectured existence which preceded the capture was in the neighbourhood in 1609, mentions the of the city by the Muhammadan contemporaries place, but does not seem to have been there. In of our king Richard I. All that is known of 1611 Finch visited Dehli, and has left a lengthy Hindu Dehli will be found collected by General account of it, which has been useful to living anti. Cunningham in the first volume of his Archwo- ! qnaries. Tom Coryat came shortly afterwards. logical Reports.
and is apparently responsible for some of the Of later times there is no lack of record. The absurdities which appeared in the contempora. Kutb Minar marks with unfading freshness and neous descriptions of Sir Thomas Roe, Terry, dignity the exultant feeling of the first Muslim Sir Thomas Herbert, and others. John Albert conquerors; and all around are the mosques, de Mandelslo, a gentleman in the service of the palaces, and tombs of every succeeding genera- Duke of Holstein, travelled from Agra to bahor tion. Nor is the record confined, even in the in 1838, but does not refer to Dehli, though he remotest times, to these large and solid works. describos Agra at some length. As Dehli was then In the ditch of Kila Rai Pithora still exists the the capital of Shah Jehân, Mandelslo cannot have grave of the man who led the assault in 1191, avoided it. This deficiency, however, if it really and who was killed at the head of the storming exists, is supplied by Tavernier, who was in party.
India at various times between 1638 and 1669, and The notices of the city in Muhammadan authors has left, from personal observation, a long account are necessarily very numerous, and are suffi- of Debli, which he calls Gehanabad.' His conciently exact to be of great use to European in. temporary Bernier, as physician to the emperor vestigators; they are now familiar to the English Aurangzib, was likewise some time in the city, and reader through the labours of Elliot and Dowson. has left the vivid and minutely detailed description
