After offering my cordial thanks to friends and subscribers who
have honoured "The Thousand Nights and a Night" (Kama Shastra
Society) with their patronage and approbation, I would inform
them that my "Anthropological Notes" are by no means exhausted,
and that I can produce a complete work only by means of a
somewhat extensive Supplement. I therefore propose to print (not
publish), for private circulation only, five volumes, bearing the
title-

Supplemental Nights
to the book of
The Thousand Nights and a Night

This volume and its successor (Nos. i. and ii.) contain Mr. John
Payne's Tales from the Arabic; his three tomes being included in
my two. The stories are taken from the Breslau Edition where
they are distributed among the volumes between Nos. iv and xii.,
and from the Calcutta fragment of 1814. I can say little for the
style of the story-stuff contained in this Breslau text, which
has been edited with phenomenal incuriousness. Many parts are
hopelessly corrupted, whilst at present we have no means of
amending the commissions and of supplying the omissions by
comparison with other manuscripts. The Arabic is not only
faulty, but dry and jejune, comparing badly with that of the
"Thousand Nights and a Night," as it appears in the Macnaghten
and the abridged Bulak Texts. Sundry of the tales are futile;
the majority has little to recommend it, and not a few require a
diviner rather than a translator. Yet they are valuable to
students as showing the different sources and the heterogeneous
materials from and of which the great Saga-book has been