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852
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1898.
admit a phonetic rather than a mythological anomaly. If I could not persuade him he could rot persuade me, et adhuc sub judice lis est !
Several more etymologies from his pen followed in the same journal, all connected with some points of general interest, all ingenions, even if not always convincing. In all these discussions, be showed himself free from all prejudices, and much as he admired his teacher, Professor Benfey, be freely expressed his divergence from him when necessary, though always in that respectful tone which a Simbys would have observed in ancient India wben differing from his Guru.
While he was in Oxford, he frequently expressed to me his great wish to get an appointment in India. I wrote at his desire to the late Mr. Howard, who was then Director of Public Instruction in Bombay, and to my great joy got the promise of an appointment for Bühler. But, unfortunately, when he arrived at Bombay, there was no Vacancy, Mr. Howard was absent, and for a time Bühler's position was extremely painful. Bat he was not to be disheartened. He soon made the acquaintance of another friend of mine at Bombay, Sir Alexander Grant, and obtained through him the very position for which he had been longing. In 1865 be began his lectures at the Elphinstone College, and proved himself most successful as a lecturer and a teacher. His power of work was great, even in the enervating climate of India, and there always is work to do in India for people who are willing to do work. He soon made the acquaintance of influential men, and he was ebosen by Mr. (now Sir) Raymond West to co-operate with him in producing their famous Digest of Bindu Law. He sapplied the Sanskțit, Sir Raymond West the logal materials, and the work, first published in 1867, is still considered the higbest authority on the subjects of the Binda Laws of Inheritance and Partition. Bat Bühler's interest went deeper. He agreed with me that the metrical Law-books of Ancient India were preceded by legal Setras belonging to what I called the Sûtra period. These Satras may really be ascribed to the end of the Vedio period, and in their earliest form may have been anterior to the Indo-Scythian conquest of the country, thougb the fixing of real dates at that period is well-nigh an impossibility. When at a much later time I conferred with him on the plan of publishing a series of translations of the Sacred Books of the East, he was ready and prepared to undertake the translation of these Satras, so far as they had been preserved in MSS. Some of these MSS., the importance of which I had pointed out as early as 1859 in my History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, I handed over to him; others he had collected himself while in India. The two volumes in which his translation of the legal Sátras of A pastamba, Gautama, Vasishtha, and Bandhayana are contained, have been amongst the most popular of the series, and I hope I shall soon be able to pablish a new edition of them with notes prepared by him for that parpose. In 1886 followed his translation of the Laws of Man", which, if he had followed the example of others, he might well have called his own, but which he gave as founded on that of Sir William Jones, carefully revised and corrected with the help of seven native commentaries. These were substantial works, snfficient to establish the repatation of any scholar, but with him they were by-work only, undertaken in order to oblige a friend and fellow-worker. These translations kept us in frequent correspondence, in which more than one important question came to be discussed. One of them was the question of what caused the gap between the Vedie period, of which these sutras may be considered as the latest outcome, and the period of that ornate metrical literature which, in my Lectures on India delivered at Cambridge in 1884, I had ventured to treat as the period of the Renaissance of Sanskrit literature, subsequent to the invasion and ocea pation of India by Indo-Scythian or Turanian tribes.
It was absolutely necessary to prove this once for all, for there were scholars who went on claiming for the author of the Laws of Manu, nay, for Kálidêsa and his contemporaries, & date before the beginning of our era. What I wanted to prove was, that nothing of what we actually possessed of that ornate (alankara) metrical literature, nor anything written in the continuous sloka, could possibly be assigned to a time previous to the Indo-Scythian invasion. The
