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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[DECEMBER, 1898.
are in it.' Bühler was in an eminent degree both common labourer and architect: it is hard to to say where he will be missed most. As a searcher and finder of mannscripts, as a promoter of archeological inquiries, and as a decipherer of inscriptions he had no rival. But he was even greater when he stepped out, as it were, from the intricate maze of his knowledge of details and turned to works of generalization: when he helped to digest Hindu Law; when he presented his unrivalled essays on Indian Paleography; when he conceived and guided the first attempt at a connected Encyclopædia of Indian Philology; above all when he propounded and solved in his own clear-headed way questions in literary history and chronology. It is but the soberest truth to say that just such a man we shall not count as one of us again, that his loss will never be quite repaired. Western scholarship owes him a debt of lasting gratitude; India may fitly deplore the loss of perhaps her truest historian.
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By way of adding something to the record of his extraordinary activity in India, I may be permitted a quotation from a letter of his, written scarcely two months before his untimely death (dated February 22nd, 1898). He is speaking of the unique manuscript of the Kashmirian Atharva-Veda, the so-called Paippaláda Chakka, which was sent to the late Professor von Roth by the British authorities in India, and is now in the possession of the library of the Tübingen University: "If, as I presume, you will print a history of the manuscript, I would ask you to mention that Sir William Mair decided on my advice to despatch the MS. to Professor von Roth. On its account I had to travel from Indor to Calcutta in February 1876, because Sir William Muir did not know what to do with the ragged volume. I pointed out to him that in the first place it stood in need of a bath; this it got in Sir William's bathroom. After that the MS. looked quite fresh, and Sir William handed it to me to have it mended by the Native book-binders. The repairs lasted for nearly a week."
NOTES ON G. BÜHLER.
BY PROF. RHYS DAVIDS.
AFTER reading the strikingly able paper by Dr. Winternitz I feel that it is only possible to add one other proof of the all-round nature of Professor Bühler's enthusiasm for knowledge of all things that had to do with the history of India. When I first knew him he had scarcely read a line of Pali. But he soon afterwards became a member of the Pali Text Society, and also (this does not always follow) read the books himself. He became as keen about the issue of cach new volume as if he had been a mere Pali scholar. And the last time he was in my study he said we were talking about Privat-docents that no one should be appointed a University teacher for Sanskrit unless he was at home also with Pali, and vice versa. He was interested chiefly in what could be gained for Indian lexicography, and the history of social institutions. But I confess I was amazed to find knowing how very busy he was, how many other interests he had had for so long a time that he should have been able to make time to read so much in these new texts. His articles on Pali subjects in the Vienna Journal, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and in the Indian Antiquary; the great importance attached by him to Pitaka evidence in the opening pages of his Indische Paleographie, and such notes as that in his Manu, p. xci., show the object he had in view. And I know from personal conversation, that he was meditating other papers of a similar kind.
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It is perhaps important to point out, as regards the subject of inner chronology,' that no one was more skilled at drawing conclusions as to the comparative chronology of two or more books from a careful comparison of their contents, than precisely Bübler. The introductions to his translations of Manu and Apastamba are elaborate examples of the importance and value of such comparisons, and of the right method to be followed in making them. It would be amply clear from them alone that it was not the use of inner chronology' as a means of investigation, that Bühler objected to, but the
1 See, for instance, ante, 1894, pp. 148-154, 242, 247.
