sources he has drawn for the preparation of the valuable papers which he has since published, a list of which would occupy several pages. Besides a large number of translations into English of Tibetan texts, he has edited in Sanskrit for the 'Bibliotheca Indica' Kshemendra's poem, entitled "Avadana Kalpalata," which he was so fortunate as to discover in Lhasa, and in Tibetan an historical work of great value, another giving the history of the pre-Buddhist or Bon religion of Tibet, a very valuable native grammatical work, and others too numerous to mention. He is now engaged, and has well on through the press, a Tibetan-English dictionary, which, he tells me, will be of about two thousand pages, exclusive of a Sanskrit-English appendix of Buddhist terms.
This brief notice of Sarat Chandra's literary work will suffice, however, to show that his labours in this field are as important as those which he has rendered to geography. Personally, I am under a lasting debt of gratitude to him for the valuable information which he gave me while in Peking, and which was later on of great use to me during my explorations in Tibet, and I hold myself particularly fortunate in having been chosen by the Royal Geographical Society to edit his reports, as it is a means of publicly expressing my indebtedness to him, and also, I trust, of helping him to take the place he so justly deserves beside Csoma de Koros, as one of the greatest pioneers of exploration and discovery in Tibet.
This introductory note would not be complete if further reference were not made to the Babu's faithful companion and assistant in his two journeys to Tibet, lama Ugyen-gyatso. The lama, who is a Tibetan from Sikkim and connected with the reigning family of that State, was born in 1851 at Yansang, and at the age of ten entered the lamasery of Pema-yangtse, where he took the usual course of monastic studies for twelve years. In 1873 he visited, for the first time, Darjiling in the suite of the Raja of Sikkim, and a little later on in the same year he was designated by that Prince, and at the request of the Deputy-Commissioner, Mr. Edgar, to fill the post of Tibetan teacher at the Bhutia school at Darjiling, which it was proposed to open. For a time the lama was employed in the office of the Deputy-Commissioner, and accompanied that officer on a visit to
