________________
lxxxvii
A Fifth Report of Operations in Search of Sanskrit MSS. in the Bombay Circle. April 1892-March 1895. By PROFESSOR PETERSON.
may
This report must, I am conscious, derive all the value it be judged to have from the first of the Appendices which follow, where I have presented a large number of extracts from the palm-leaf manuscripts preserved at Anhilvad Patan. An accouut of my visit to that town was given in my Fourth Report; and in the foregoing Index of Authors I have endeavoured to set out in that convenient form the information with regard to the books and their authors which these extracts supply. The great importance of the Patan palm-leaf manuscripts is a theme on which it is not necessary again to enlarge. But the hope may be expressed that the specimens here presented may stimulate the Jain community, and other parties concerned, to take effectual steps for dragging these books into the light again. The oldest of them goes back as far as to A.D. 1062, and I have shown that there are at least twenty of them that were written between that date and A. D. 1224. I know of no other town in India, and of few in the world, that can boast so great a store of documents of such venerable antiquity. They would be the pride, and the jealously guarded treasure, of any University Library in Europe. In Patan they lie absolutely disregarded and unknown. I trust it may not be altogether idle to express the hope that it may not be long before this reproach is taken away.
The Index of Authors, with which the Report opens, is the second of the kind I have furnished. In the previous
