2 article on the 20 volumes of Mr. HUNTER'S Statistical Account of Bengal, "The Englishman who dips, as we have done into this deep spring, will be filled with a new and nobler pride for the Empire which his nation has made and maintained in the East. Not warlike fame, nor imposing majesty, wealth, or the national power which guarantees the Sovereignty of India, make upon him the strongest impression. It is much more the feeling of the earnest and solemn duty which fate has imposed upon his country to free India from misrule, to make it the England of Asia, and the centre of a new civilization for that continent." THE IMPERIAL GAZETTEER OF INDIA offers to the public the result of these inquiries in a cheap and compendious form. All features of general interest have been retained, and the historical sections have in some cases been amplified. The task of condensation has been conducted by Mr. HUNTER, with the aid of distinguished assistants, in England; and he has had the opportunity of revising his materials in India, having travelled over 50,000 miles while engaged in superintending and testing the work. A complete Index will exhibit all the subjects-Economical, Historical, Social and Religious, as well as Geographical-with which the IMPERIAL GAZETTEER deals. The first Six Volumes, "ABAR" to "MYSORE," will be published in March, price £2 28. for the six; the remaining Three, "NAAF" to “ZUTTHUT," will follow in June, price £118, for the three. The number of copies for sale will be limited, and orders for the complete work will receive precedence. Messrs. TRÜBNER & Co. are now prepared to register the names of intending purchasers. The following details connected with the history of this great national work are taken from the Resolution of the Government of India, dated 8th September, 1871, and published in its official Gazette. They will be interesting to bibliographers. "The Governor-General has had under his careful consideration the question of the preparation of Provincial Gazetteers, and their eventual consolidation into an Imperial Statistical Account of India. Three distinct series of operations have, in time past, been undertaken or encouraged by the Government, with a view to obtaining trustworthy accounts of the country, such as might form a Gazetteer of India; the whole representing a very large outlay, commencing as far back as 1769; and one of the efforts (in 1807) costing £30,000 for merely collecting the materials for part of a single Province. 3 "From a variety of causes, all more or less proceeding from defective organization, this large expenditure, while accumulating isolated materials of great value, failed to yield any systematic and comprehensive result. At length, in 1855, the Court of Directors directed the Governor-General to procure, by local inquiries, and with as little delay as possible, such information as may be effective for rendering the work a faithful register of the state of the country as at present existing. Various attempts have been made by the Local Governments to give effect to these orders. It was practically found that no satisfactory basis existed for the work," and after receiving a series of fresh instructions from the Secretary of State, ending in 1867, "the Government of India addressed all the Local Administrations, requesting that steps may be taken for the compilation of a Gazetteer, in accordance with the wishes of Her Majesty's Government. "Various schemes were set on foot to give effect to these orders, some of them so costly as to be altogether disproportionate to the results to be attained. But His Excellency in Council observes that excessive costliness is not the only unfortunate effect of the want of organization, which left each Local Government to invent a scheme of its own, irrespective of what was being done in other Provinces. There was, in fact, no unity of plan or central supervision, and the results did not contain the materials required for the comparative statistics of the Empire. Meanwhile, the necessity of systematic organization had been pressed on the Government of India from various quarters, particularly by the commercial community and the Asiatic Society of Bengal. The latter body urged that, without a uniform plan, the value of each local Gazetteer will, in a measure, be depreciated; and whenever the compilation of the Gazetteer of India shall be determined on, a considerable amount of the work will have to be gone over again de novo.' Accordingly, in July, 1869, His Excellency in Council declared his conviction that immediate steps should be taken to ensure uniformity; and to that effect appointed Mr. W. W. Hunter, LL.D., to visit the Local Governments and ascertain what had been done in each; with a view to his drawing up a comprehensive scheme, prescribing the principles for the compilation of the Provincial Gazetteers, and for their ultimate consolidation into one work. "In November, 1869, Mr. Hunter submitted his Plan for an Imperial Gazetteer of India, in which he exhaustively explained the materials already available, and arranged for that systematic organization and central control, the absence of which has proved fatal to the completeness of all the previous efforts from 1769 to 1855, and to the progress of the present one throughout the fifteen years during which the operations have been going on between 1855 and 1870. The general statistical operations will extend over ten separate Governments, which, with their Feudatory States, administer a territory of 1,556,836 square miles, and govern a population estimated at 200,424.072 souls," [since ascertained to be 240 millions.] "Throughout this vast area, widely different schemes had been propounded by the Local Administrations, some of them involving a very extravagant outlay, others 4 of too meagre a character. The experience of the last few years shows that, in the absence of a central organization, the cost of the enterprise will swell to an enormous total, while the same heterogeneous incompleteness which rendered all previous efforts infructuose will again result. Without a central guiding authority, economy and uniformity are alike impossible. The Governor-General in Council is of opinion that this central control can best be obtained by the Government availing itself of the suggestions contained in Mr. Hunter's Plan, and by securing for the execution of the design the supervision of the designer." "The Imperial Gazetteer will be the condensation and fruit of a series of statistical surveys of each of the administrative or political divisions of India, specially and minutely compiled within moderate limits of time; and it will thus occupy a very different position from all previous essays in this direction, in which the materials were derived in part from data which were frequently far from contemporaneous, and often no better than the chance records of travellers."-Despatch of the Secretary of State to the Governor-General of India in Council, dated 22nd February, 1877. By the same Author, A STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF BENGAL. 20 VOLS., HALF MOROCCO, 58. EACH, WITH MAPS. AND A STATISTICAL ACCOUNT OF ASSAM. 2 VOLS., HALF MOROCCO, 7s. ed. EACH, WITH MAPS. "Twenty volumes of material, collected under the most favourable auspices, are built up in his hands into a vast but accessible storehouse of invaluable facts. Invaluable to the statesman, the adminstrator, and the historian, they are no less interesting to the general reader. Mr. Hunter undoubtedly has the faculty of making the dry bones of statistics live. But they also contain matter which may be regarded as the foundation of the yet unwritten history of Bengal. They are a guide for administrative action now. They also seem to be the point of a new departure for the future."-The Nineteenth Century. "We have here for the first time a trustworthy, intelligent, and interesting account of each district of the principal province of India—a marvel of industry and organization of which any man might be proud."-Calcutta Quarterly Review. LONDON: TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL. Publicationen von Julius Platzmann, Inhaber des Ritterkreuzes I. Classe Leipzig: B. G. Teubner. Vocabulario de la lengua Mexicana compuesto por el P. FR. ALONSO de MOLINA publicado de nuevo por JULIO PLATZMANN. Edicion facsimilaria. 2 Bände [I. Band XVI u. 242 2spalt. S., II. Band IV u. 326 2spalt. S.] kl. Folio. Preis geh. M. 50.-, auf holländischem Papier M. 80.— Très belle réimpression faite avec le plus grand soin sur l'édition rarissime de Mexico 1571. Bibliotheca Americana. Supplément No. I. The present edition produced at the cost of the enthusiastic Trübner's American, European, & Oriental Literary Record. Bisher existieren drei Wörterbücher der mexicanischen (Nahuatl-) Sprache: von Molina, Mexico 1555 und 1571, von Arenas, das. 1611, 1668, 1690, 1728 und Puebla 1831, und von Biondelli, Mailand 1858. Von diesen ist das erste zugleich das bedeutendste und seltenste; Quaritch bot 1879 die erste Auflage zu 72 L., die zweite zu 28 Ł. aus; das Buch war für die Wissenschaft so gut wie verloren, und es ist keines der geringsten Verdienste unseres vortrefflichen Landsmannes, des Herrn Julius Platzmann, dass er es der Welt zurückgegeben hat. Die Ausgabe ist wieder ein wahres Cabinetsstück und ein Meisterwerk der Drugulin'schen Druckerei. Ref. weiss, wie peinlich genau die Correctur bewerkstelligt worden, und er hat sich durch eine Vergleichung mit dem Originale überzeugt, dass hier der Typendruck die Aufgabe des Facsimilierens wieder in wahrhaft unglaublicher Weise gelöst hat. alle erdenkliche Weise zu unterstützen; grössere Bibliotheken, welche Prachtwerke anderer Art mit bedeutendem Aufwande anschaffen, sollten auch in diesem Falle der Wissenschaft und der Kunst ihren Tribut nicht versagen. Die von dem Verleger gestellten Preise sind wahrlich sehr bescheiden, und die Auflagen sind nicht so gross, dass man auf vortheilhafte Zweitehandkäufe speculieren dürfte. Schön aber wäre es eben nicht, wenn Herausgeber und Verleger schliesslich Muth und Lust verlören, weil sie im eigenen Vaterlande nicht die verdiente Anerkennung finden. Diesmal nun gilt es einer Sprache, welche in zweifacher Hinsicht als classisch gelten muss: als einstige Trägerin einer blühenden Cultur und als eine der wichtigsten Vertreterinnen des wunderbaren polysynthetischen Baues. Die Sprachforscher wissen, welche Belehrungen Humboldt und Steinthal dem Nahuatl verdankten. GEORG VON Der Gabelentz. Literarisches Centralblatt. 1880. No. 50. Die zahlreichen von Herrn J. Platzmann herausgegebenen Neudrucke amerikanischer Grammatiken und Wörterbücher sind von geradezu epochemachender Bedeutung für die Amerikanistik. Seine FacsimileAusgaben stehen sowohl in Hinsicht der peinlichen Genauigkeit als auch durch ihre glänzende Ausstattung einzig da, und es braucht kaum noch besonders hervorgehoben zu werden, dass sich das vorliegende „Vocabulario" durch diese Vorzüge in gleicher Weise auszeichnet, wie seine Vorgänger. Der innere Werth des Werkes und die Bedeutung desselben für das Studium der mexikanischen Sprache darf als bekannt vorausgesetzt werden, und es sei daher nur noch bemerkt, dass Ref. trotz sorgfältiger Vergleichung mit dem Originale eine Abweichung von demselben nicht zu entdecken vermochte. Dass der Herr Herausgeber das Buch dem Andenken Catharina's der Grossen gewidmet hat, wird jeder Sprachforscher, dem die grossartige Anregung und Förderung, welche sowohl die Sprachenkunde im Allgemeinen, als auch insbesondere die Amerikanistik den,, Vocabularia comparativa“ zu verdanken hat, erklärlich finden. Dr. Wilhelm Grube. The literature of the aboriginal languages of America has of late been enriched with a series of important publications, among the most valuable of which must be counted the fac-simile republication of the ,,Aztec Dictionary" of the friar Alonzo de Molina, second edition of 1571. The original of this work heretofore afforded the principal help for the study of the Aztec language in its most highly cultivated dialect, that of Anahuac. This quarto had become quite scarce and high-priced; much rarer still, and almost unattainable, is the first edition of 1565, which was published in the shape of a moderate octavo volume. Bernardino de Sahagun had translated portions of the Bible into Aztec in the sixteenth century, at a time when Aztec had undergone, but few of the foreign influences experienced since the conquest, and Biondelli published this text with the dictionary at Milan, 1858, 4°. But this dictionary contains only the Biblical words, and, therefore, does not comprehend many of the national and enchoric terms so important for the ethnologist and linguist. The printed Aztec literature is the most extensive of all the literatures of aboriginal languages, though almost exclusively religious, and hence the Americanists will hear with interest of this new edition of both parts, Spanish - Aztec and Aztec-Spanish, together with all the title-vignettes, prefaces and additions, which contain a great deal of grammatical information. Should Mr. Julius Platzmann, to whom the republication is due, produce in the same manner some of the more notable Aztec texts and the catechism on the western dialect of the State of Jalisco, he would aid considerably the |