"You recollect having seen here the excellent plates of that place. Now Mr. Brumund is to give a descriptive text to them, which he has nearly ready. Plates and text (in a French translation) are to be edited in Holland; the lithographing has since more than a year commenced. "You understand that a visit to your Hindu remains will be most useful to Mr. Brumund, and I recommend him strongly to your kind assistance. Mr. Brumund will bring you the first ten sheets of my Essay on Inscriptions; a complete exemplar I will send next month by

the mail.

Yours, &c.

(Signed) R. FRIEDERICH."

Government letter No. 927, dated 16th April 1859, transmits copy of a letter from E. Thomas, Esq., late Bengal Civil Service, which had been received from Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for India, in his Despatch, dated 11th January 1859, respecting certain Gupta coins which had been previously examined by the President. It is as follows:

"SIR,-In compliance with the request conveyed in your letter of the 9th ultimo, I examined the coins found at Sanund and forwarded by the Government of Bombay.

"The majority of these pieces have been so correctly assigned by Mr. Frere in his report [see p. li], which accompanied the communication of the Bombay Government, that but little remains to be said with regard to them, and so very large a proportion of the entire number are from the Mints of one and the same king, and of a type, moreover, previously well known, that they are found to offer but little either of historic or numismatic value.

“I may remark that the bulk of the coins are rightly attributed to Kumara Gupta, whose epoch, however, I have reason to think, in opposition to Major Cunningham, may be preferentially placed in the 3rd century A.D.

"Mr. Frere has exclusively assigned 508 of these pieces to the monarch in question, and I am further able to read his name in many cases and his distinctive titles in nearly all the legends of the 593 coins returned as doubtful.

"With advertence to the 283 coins on which my opinion is more expressly sought, I regret to say that the specimens now contributed do not in any way aid in the definitive determination of the purport of the legend they bear, in common with the extensive class of cognate mintages [to which they belong]. It is true that the coins themselves are in excellent preservation, but their die-execution is rude and faulty

in the extreme, more especially in respect to the formation of the letters which present the mere imitative semblance of the original characters, while other signs which should form a portion of the standard legend, are altogether omitted. I am in a position to state this much from a collation of their superscriptions with that on a well-executed coin of the same type, but of earlier issue, in the possession of Mr. G. H. Freeling, Bengal Civil Service, which, though incompletely legible, clearly developes the local title of Bhataraka, and the ordinary Surashtran prefix of Raja Mahi Kshatrapa, together with a name, the concluding portion of which may be doubtfully given as ' Agra Damne.”

EDWARD THOMAS.

"P.S.—The above was prepared some time since in immediate reply to your letter under acknowledgment, but I have delayed its transmission till I had an opportunity of submitting my original fac-similes to Professor Wilson, on his return to town, in the hope that he might be able to suggest a more comprehensive reading of the more accurately engraved legend on Mr. Freeling's coins; but on close scrutiny, it is found that, the abrasion of the edges of the piece in question forbids any positive interpretation beyond what I have given above."

Of the coining apparatus above mentioned,* Mr. Frere states as follows:

"The set of minting tools which I have now the pleasure of presenting to the Society, were given to me by Government for that purpose.

"They were used in the Mint at Ahmedabad, which was abolished in 1836, and it is curious to think that, the British Government of that day, should have been coining Rupees at the same time in Bombay, in the perfect and beautiful Mint in front of our windows, and at Ahmedabad, not three hundred miles off, with these rude and inartificial tools.

"The tools consist of an anvil (erun) and a sledge-hammer (ghun). A reverse die to fit into the socket on the anvil (jhakun); and obverse die (purkala).

"The anvil was imbedded in a large log of Babool or Kyan wood, which was sunk in the ground, and the reverse die being fixed into the socket with wedges, the silver of proper weight and alloy was placed on it, and the obverse die held on the silver and struck with the hammer, the silver then became a rupee, such as we were accustomed to see in general circulation some twenty years ago.

* See Presents for the Museum, p. xxvii.

"The legend on the reverse die is :—

'The happy coin of Akber Shah the victorious king, 1249.' "On the reverse the legend is

اکبر شاه بادشاه غازي سکه مبارک ۱۲۴۹

ضرب احمد آباد سنه ۲۷ جلوس میمنت مانوس

'Struck at Ahmedabad the 27th year of his prosperous reign.' "Chronologists will be surprised at seeing a coin of Akber's bearing date A.H. 1249, which extended from 21st May 1833 to 10th May 1834, and to find on the reverse the 27th year of his reign, which, had it been Akber Shah (Jelaloodeen Mohamed Akber), would have been A.H. 991. But their surprise at the confusion of dates will be changed into surprise at our timidity, when they recollect that, this is not an imitation or copy of a coin of the great Akber, but was the die used at a British Mint in 1833-34, and bears the title of the paramount sovereign in whose name we struck it, the then Puppet King of Delhi, Akbar II. (Abul Nasir Mooienoodeen Mahomed), who began his nominal reign A.H. 1221 (A.D. 1806), so that the 27th year of his reign would be A.H. 1248-49, A.d. 1833.

"My friend Mr. Jordan, the Deputy Collector at Ahmedabad (to whom I am much indebted for coins and information about them, not confined to those of the Ahmedabad mint), has been unable to procure me a rupee of A.H. 1249, and the one most resembling the die on these tools which I have been able to procure out of some thirty which Mr. Jordan sent me from my own collection is the one I now have the pleasure of presenting to the Society. It bears date Ak. 12, and, as far as I can decipher, A.H. 1234, which would be A.D. 1818.

"A comparison between this rupee and the die will show how small a part of the legend was transferred to the rupee in the degenerate days of native mints, and it might be useful to those who take interest in the subject, to know that all the mints under the British Government, except at the Presidency towns, having now long been suppressed, there was, and, I believe, still is a mint furnished with tools exactly resembling these, and coining rupees no better than the one before you, to be seen at work at Baroda. I saw it when there in 1857, and have not heard of its either having been abolished or improved.". 12th May 1859.

With reference to Mr. E. E. Elliot's note resigning his membership, &c., the President, W. E. Frere, Esq., observed :-

"The meeting must, I am sure, have heard with much regret the

note just read by the Secretary. Mr. Elliot was elected a Member of the Society in the year 1816, and has been a constant subscriber to it ever since, and, although we have no 'Papers' to show, as contributions received from him, yet the records show that he has been a most assiduous reader. The "Rules" allow that any person who has, by donation or otherwise, materially contributed to promote the objects of this Institution might be elected an Honorary Member. Few have contributed so much as Mr. Elliot has, viz. 43 years' subscriptions, to our funds, and I am sure we should do right in conferring on him this honorary distinction. I have therefore much pleasure in proposing that he be elected an Honorary Member of the Society. The Secretary and Captain Forbes join with me in this proposal, and therefore we may, in accordance with the Rules of the Society, proceed to his immediate ballot."

A ballot then took place, and Mr. Elliot was unanimously elected.

The following note from General LeGrand Jacob to the Secretary, together with its enclosure to General Jacob's address from the Rev. R. Friederich, were read :

"Bombay, May 22nd, 1859.

"Herewith another letter from Mr. Friederich which I have answered, but I hope you will also send him a line when you acknowledge his late books. Perhaps you could remedy the mistake he speaks of, viz. a double No. VI. and no No. V.

"I don't know what he means by examplars of inscriptions,' but Dr. Wilson will know what he received from him. Dr. Wilson sent me some few sheets a few months ago-and unhappily they have, I think, been packed with my books sent by sea. I was ill at the time, and could not pay proper attention, or they should in preference have been given to our Society. If I find them when in London, I will give them to the Parent Society. I forgot to mention this in my letter to Mr. Friederich. Will you kindly do so?

"I have sent and am sending him (Mr. F.) altogether eleven Purànàs, viz:

"The greater number are being copied at Kolapore, and some here

by Bhawoo Dajee and Vishwanath Narayan's assistance. My agents,

Smith, Taylor, & Co., have arranged with me for their transmission. When I get home, I shall try and move the Parent Society to interest themselves in the affair. I think it should be taken up rather by a Society than by a private individual liable to be suddenly cut off, and driven hither and thither for health.

"I have urged Mr. Friederich, by every consideration, to get us the Bali edition of the Brahmanda, if he has no time to translate it into English, and to interline Nagri letters between the Kawi.

Following is Mr. Friederich's letter:

(Signed) L. JACOB."

"Gadok, near Buitenferg, 6th April 1859.

"MY DEAR COL. LEGRAND JACOB,

"I received your letter of 2nd November 1858, on the 7th December, and the Bhagavata Purána on the 29th of the same month.

"I should have written to you long before this, and thanked you for your kindness, but I expected till now an answer to a letter of mine sent on the 7th November 1858, wherein I have recapitulated all the letters and prints I have sent to Bombay since October 1857.

"It seems that nothing from me has reached you, and I shall now make a second recapitulation, hoping that this letter at least, will reach you, because I send it to the care of a merchant-house at Singhapura.

"There has been lost also one letter and package from Hongkong, and one from Calcutta, all at Singhapura; but the rest of my correspondence with these two places has not miscarried. I cannot understand how all and every thing sent to Bombay should have been totally lost. I give you an accurate account of all I know of since 1856.

"A letter from Mr. Carter, Secretary, Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, dated 1st of February 1856, was received in March or April of the same year. It contained my nomination as an Honorary Member of your Society on the proposition of yourself, the Rev. Dr. J. Wilson, and Colonel J. Hale, and annexed to it, a wish of the Society that I would edit the Brahmanda Purana of Bali.

"At the same time I also received a complete set of the Society's Journal up to that date, and a short time afterwards received the last part of Vol. V. of the same Journal; only I have received by mistake two examplars of No. 5 of Vol. I., and none of No. 5. This has happened because to the one examplar of No. 6 the outer cover of No. 5, with the enumeration of the contents of that number had been affixed. I should have answered quickly to that letter, and attested the high sense