undeserved. It is doubtful if the researches into Oriental histories and
literatures by the Russians have been yet adequately appreciated in
England, the tireless efforts of Dr. Pollen and the Anglo-Russian
Literary Society notwithstanding. It is apparently still presumed that
ripe scholarship in Arabic and Sanskrit is inconceivable except through
the medium of the languages of Western Europe. No unworthy disparagement
of French labours is at all suggested. But it is only fair to Russia to
remember in India that the absence of a Serg d'Oldenberg would leave a
lacuna which must be felt in Buddhist Sanskrit; without Tzerbatski the
Jain literature both Magadhi and Sanskrit would be appreciably poorer;
and that the Continent has produced nothing to exceed the series of
Buddhist Sanskrit texts of Petrograd, where was published the still
largest Sanskrit lexicon. Naturally in the province of Chinese and
Japanese the Russian Academy at Vladivostock stood _facile princeps_
till only the other day its magnificent rival was established in London
under the direction of Dr. Denison Ross. An individual scholar like
Khanikoff, who like most of his countrymen in the last century preferred
to write in French, and a Zukovski has done more signal service to
Persian antiquities than could be honestly attributed to many a German
name familiar to Indian scholars. The distinguishing feature of the
Russian investigator, devoted to the past of Persia, is his uncommon
equipment. The Russian bring to their task a mature study of Semitic
languages and acquaintance with Avesta philology. Arabic literature
teems with allusions to the religions, dogma, customs and the court of
Sasanian Iran. Once intended for contemporaries equally at home in the
Arabic and Persian idioms these references have in course of time grown
obscure to copyists who have mutilated Iranian names of persons and
places and specific Zoroastrian terms which had become naturalised in
the language of the ruling Arabs. It is scholars like Baron Rosen and
Rosenberg who have adequately appreciated the value of Arabic texts in